A Tone Parallel‖—Jazz Music, Leftist Politics, and the Counter-Minstrel Narrative, 1930-1970

―A TONE PARALLEL‖—JAZZ MUSIC, LEFTIST POLITICS, AND THE COUNTER-MINSTREL NARRATIVE, 1930-1970

by Kevin Michael Angelo Strait

B.A., 1997, Wesleyan University M.A., 2002, The George Washington University

A Dissertation submitted to

The Faculty of Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

May 16, 2010

Dissertation directed by

James A. Miller Professor of English and American Studies

The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Kevin M. Strait has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of

Philosophy as of December 15, 2009. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation.

"A TONE PARALLEL‖—JAZZ MUSIC, LEFTIST POLITICS, AND THE COUNTER-

MINSTREL NARRATIVE, 1930-1970

Kevin Michael Angelo Strait

Dissertation Research Committee:

James A. Miller, Professor of English and American Studies, Dissertation

Director

Gayle Wald, Associate Professor of English, Committee Member

Thomas A. Guglielmo, Associate Professor of American Studies,

Committee Member

iii Dedication

For Ty, and my two golden nephews Nicolas and Zachary

iv Acknowledgments

I owe a debt of gratitude to the friends, family, and teachers who have been with me since the beginning stages of this project. I am especially thankful for the guidance, patience, and friendship of my advisor James A. Miller. I met Jim on my third day of graduate school and nervously told him of my interest in music, in which he promptly affirmed, ―There hasn‘t been a significant piece of music since John Coltrane‘s ‗A Love

Supreme.‖ Although we disagreed on that detail, I‘ve had the privilege of conversing with

Jim over the years on a number of issues serious and trivial, professional and personal.

Jim‘s encouragement during the research stage of this dissertation allowed me to trust the foundations of my root ideas and his keen insight helped me to develop a better sense of clarity with the more complex issues of this project. I am honored to have been his student and I am forever grateful for his reassuring counsel. I am also thankful for the 9 years (and counting) of advice and tutelage from my unofficial ―co-advisor‖ James O. Horton.

Throughout the years, Jim has been my fiercest advocate and he remains the model of what a teacher, scholar, and mentor should be. Without a doubt, the ―two Jim‘s‖ have been a stabilizing force for me during my years of graduate study and I feel genuinely privileged having gone through this experience with such wonderful people.

To the members of my dissertation committee, I owe special thanks. Since my days as a Masters student, Gayle Wald‘s candor, reassurance, and tough questions have helped me to develop into a more thoughtful and effective scholar. Whether reading drafts or requiring me to dig deeper in my analysis, Thomas Guglielmo‘s support has been

v unwavering throughout this process. I also want to thank Charlie McGovern and John

Vlach for their insightful assistance during my defense.

I am deeply indebted for the years of intellectual and emotional support from the faculty and staff at GWU, including Terry Murphy, Melani McAlister, Phyllis Palmer,

Barney Mergen, and Maureen Kentoff. I also want to thank Kip Lornell, who during the early stages of my graduate student career, helped me develop several of the key ideas I am now pursuing in my scholarship.

The friendships I have made with my colleagues at GWU have been the highlight of my graduate school experience. In this ever-expanding community, we share an endless amount of inside jokes and references that have made the grind endurable. The diversity of their personalities and ideas has truly enriched my life. I am especially indebted to the tireless efforts of my writing group, affectionately (and perhaps, bewilderingly) known as

―the Stallions‖ and consisting of my classmates David Kieran, Lars Lierow, and Jeremy

Hill. Without these good and generous friends I am sure I could not have finished this project. I owe each of them many, many thanks.

Julie Elman deserves several pages in her honor for her extraordinary ability to unravel my unfinished ideas into comprehensible strands of thought. Julie is a remarkable scholar, musician, and friend. I also want to thank my fellow GWU comrades throughout the years, including Kyle Riismandel, Laurel Clark, Stephanie Ricker Schulte, and

Cameron Logan. Many thanks as well to Laura Cook Kenna, Yusuke Torii, Charity Fox,

Joan Fragazsy Troyano, Amber Wiley, Laurie Lahey, Sandra Heard, Denise Meringolo,

Paul Gardullo, Kim Yates, Ramzi Fawaz, Kathleen Brian, Elizabeth Breiseth, and Emily

Dietsch for their friendship and encouragement along the way.

vi Thanks as well to my dear friends from Wesleyan University, including Maria

Magana, Sabelo Narasimhan, Jessica Thompson, Caleb Tucker-Raymond, Caroline

Cummings, Jennifer Kelly Dewitt, Mike Shen, Ama Greenrose, and Courtney Cavellier.

I‘m especially grateful to my good friend Allison Perlman who was never too busy (even though she definitely was) to lend a hand. I also want to thank Jay Hoggard, Anthony

Braxton, Ashraf Rushdie, Gayle Pemberton, and Pheeroan Aklaff for inspiring me to pursue a Ph.D. Many thanks as well to my friends Sean and Dayna Gibbons for their extraordinary support throughout my graduate career.

I want to thank my family, beginning with my father, George, who has believed in my ability to complete a dissertation years before I even considered graduate school.

Getting me out of my shell over the years has at times been a tough sell, but I want to thank my father for coaching me through my unfinished ideas, and inspiring me to complete my degree through his own effortlessly inquisitive and diligent nature. My mother Lisa kept me going during the toughest stages of writing and researching, whether with a care package of brownies, a thoughtful card, or just a reassuring phone call to say how proud she was and how proud my grandparents would be of my accomplishments. My oldest friend also happens to be my brother, Eric. I am most thankful for his extraordinary capacity to listen and hear me out when graduate school presented its toughest challenges.

Always just a phone call away, Eric‘s positive contributions to my work and life have been simply enormous and witnessing him with his wonderful wife Diana and their two beautiful children Nicolas and Zachary has inspired me to progress in life far beyond a career in academia. Finally, thanks to my soon-to-be-wife Tyrese. My best friend and soulmate, Ty also happens to be the funniest person I know and I can honestly say that our

vii happy life at home granted me the personal and intellectual space to think creatively and finish this dissertation. My words cannot adequately express my level of admiration for her kind spirit and her own assiduous work ethic that inspired me to work the extra hour to complete this project. Luckily, I will have the rest of my life to thank her for everything she has done for me throughout this process.

viii

Abstract of Dissertation

"A Tone Parallel‖—Jazz Music, Leftist Politics, and the Counter-Minstrel Narrative, 1930-

1970

My dissertation analyzes the ways that musicians voiced, through the medium of jazz, the values and politics of black public intellectuals and the political left. By arguing that jazz was a sonic expression of the anti-racist politics of black public intellectuals, my dissertation works to extend the scope and study of race and racial politics outside the well traversed realms of literary and visual studies to incorporate music. Ultimately, this project reveals the music as a form of political activism and illustrates how jazz of the New Deal era developed a viable, tangible political resonance that shaped the history of race and racial politics to the era of the Civil Rights Movement. My project begins by locating the

―modern‖ incarnations of jazz outside of its blues-associated, New Orleans roots, and instead as a product of the leftist, Marxist values that circulated amongst black public intellectuals during the New Deal. Understanding jazz as a product of the Popular Front offers insight into the ways debates concerning black radical politics shaped not only the music, but the manner in which politically active black artists influenced the politics and ideals of American society. Additionally, this dissertation explores how the musical language of jazz functioned as a narrative for what I call the ―counter-minstrel‖ activity of jazz musicians. This counter-minstrel activity enabled jazz musicians to work as entertainers and political figures within a mainstream that still operated on the logic inherited from blackface minstrelsy, contrary to the purportedly apolitical stance of the musicians themselves. Thus, this dissertation contends that the primary political actions of

ix black jazz musicians were articulated in the display of their artistic responses to the lingering history of the minstrel show. This dissertation also argues that the ―soundings‖ of musicians, located in the cultural work of their music and public endeavors, allowed for these artists to function as black public intellectuals engaging in the pursuit of African-

American social, artistic, and political freedom.

x Table of Contents

Dedication ...... iv

Acknowledgments ...... v

Abstract of Dissertation ...... ix

Table of Contents ...... xi

Introduction…………………………………………………………………..1

Chapter 1: "The Duke Steps Out of the Jungle;" Race, Minstrelsy, and the Counter-Minstrel Narrative of "Reminiscing in Tempo ...... 21

Chapter 2: "A People's Music;" The Jazz Community, Communism, and Counter-Minstrel Strategies ...... 71

Chapter 3: "The Secret Weapon is a Long Blue Note;" The Foreign Stage, Transnational Influence, and the Counter-Minstrel Identiy of Jazz in the Cold War ...... 117

Chapter 4: "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down;" The Transitional Cultural Politics of Black Power Ideology, the "Free" Period, and the Post-Minstrel Jazz Identity ...... 162

Conclusion: ...... 208

Bibliography ...... 213

Introduction

This study is an examination of the ways that musicians articulated, through the medium of jazz, the values and politics of black public intellectuals and the political Left from 1930-1970. The goal of this project is to raise the stakes concerning the significance of jazz in the political discourse of African-Americans. Although jazz, as a medium, has consistently been the focus of ethnomusicological and aesthetic critique, my study offers a novel historical evacuation of its performers and its political and ideological tonalities at the levels of composition, sound, and performance. And by arguing that jazz was a functional tool that interpreted ideology, this dissertation extends the scope and study of race and racial politics outside the well traversed visual and literary realms by incorporating music.

This project illustrates how jazz of the New Deal era developed a viable, tangible political resonance that shaped the history of race and racial politics to the period of the

Black Power Movement. It begins by locating the ―modern‖ incarnations of jazz outside of its blues-associated, New Orleans roots, examining it instead as a product of the leftist,

Marxist values that circulated amongst black public intellectuals during the New Deal.

Understanding jazz as a product of the Popular Front offers insight into the ways debates about race and racial politics shaped the music and the manner in which politically active black artists influenced the politics and ideals of American society. My project therefore analyzes the cultural work of jazz music and places the art alongside the trajectory of the

Marxist ideology that framed the discussion of black public intellectuals in the 1930s—a trajectory complicated by the difficult history of minstrelsy that significantly circumscribed

1 the scope and depth of popular art, as well as the art that voiced the radical, politically alternative concerns of the Left.

Specifically, this dissertation argues that the musical language of jazz functioned as a narrative for what I call the ―counter-minstrel‖ activity of jazz musicians. This counter- minstrel activity enabled jazz musicians to work as entertainers and political figures within a mainstream that still operated on the logic inherited from blackface minstrelsy, contrary to the purportedly apolitical stance of the musicians themselves. This dissertation argues that the ―soundings‖ of musicians, located in the cultural work of their music and public endeavors, allowed for these artists to function as black public intellectuals engaging in the pursuit of African-American social, artistic, and political freedom.1

As stated, this dissertation begins its investigation by examining the jazz of the swing era. An over-emphasis of the meta-narrative of jazz‘s ―blues heritage‖ occludes the significance of the modernist applications specific to jazz of the New Deal. This dissertation therefore continues with current scholarship that historicizes the art outside of the folk-art blueprint, beginning with a discussion of Duke Ellington, his jungle music phase, and specifically his 1935 long-form piece, ―Reminiscing in Tempo.‖ Investigating

Ellington‘s piece and the political development of his musical language in the 1930s diverges from the ―new jazz studies‖ scholarship that broadly characterizes the music of the

1 My use of the term ―soundings‖ stems directly from the work of Houston Baker Jr., who defines this term as a transformative and unifying metaphor for the discursive capacities of African-Americans. Baker‘s term was conceived to apply to black modernists of the Harlem Renaissance and represents the broad narrative dynamics of black public intellectuals to convey the gamut of human emotion, specifically through artistic expression. For this dissertation, I conceive the ―soundings‖ of jazz musicians as a discursive strategy, producing art that narrates a path through the artistic, social, structural confines of minstrelsy. Houston Baker, Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996). 2 swing era as either the compositionally interchangeable or the ideologically conjoined results of the mechanized products of cultural industry and the amalgamated politics of the

Popular Front, New Deal artistic programs.

Commenting on the ―stylized machine rhythms and aesthetics‖ of African-

American music in the swing era, Joel Dinerstein argues that jazz performed functionally in the ―adaptation to modernity,‖ noting its industrialized aesthetics as ―the nation‘s popular music in the Machine Age (1919-45) because its driving, syncopated rhythms reflected the speeded-up tempo of life produced by industrialization in the American work place and the mechanization of urban life.‖2 This perspective on jazz firmly situates the music within an historical era by citing its identity as a stamped product of industry. And although musically derivative, this artistic uniformity hints at the musical language emanating from swing that produced a narrative for the times. Specifically, Dinerstein‘s analysis contributes to the commonplace perception of jazz in the swing era as a reconstruction of

―the tempo of life‖ that provides a degree of steady rhythm through the fluctuations experienced as a result of the tumultuous politics of the New Deal.3 Limited in the study of

1930s jazz, however, is the recognition of swing‘s capacity for compositional and aesthetic variety; two musical components that indicate a more encompassing narrative of the times, accounting for the numerous shifts and diversity of thought ubiquitously characteristic of the New Deal era.

On one hand, swing is often defined through a Tin-Pan Alley, mass-produced, sonically static, and artistically interchangeable perspective regardless of the efforts of new

2 Joel Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine (Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 4-7. 3 jazz scholars to re-envision the music as something other than the creatively inferior middle child of New Orleans based ―Jazz Age‖ post-ragtime style and post-WWII bebop jazz. The current reclamation of the swing era, however, takes shape from an illustration of the music and its musicians as emergent emblems of the nationalized tenets of the early stages of the

FDR era that symbolically embraced populist and democratic ideals with examples of interracial alliance and economic agency in the face of a segregated nation. Indeed, much of the scholarship concerning the music of the 1930s has reclaimed the artistic relevancy and ideological agency of the swing era from the rubric laid out by the multivalent works of

David Stowe, Lewis Erenberg, and others who have provided a functional template for jazz studies in the past decade. Arguing candidly for the democratic functionality of jazz in the

1930s, David Stowe‘s analysis of the era describes swing as ―the preeminent expression of the New Deal: a cultural form of ‗the people,‘ accessible, inclusive, distinctively democratic, and thus distinctively American.‖4 Presenting the associations of jazz and

Marxist politics as ―imperfect‖ and solely part of swing‘s ―ambiguously left-leaning ideology,‖ Stowe ultimately preserves his rubric claiming that ―despite these alignments, the fit between the Communist Party and big-band jazz was never a seamless one.‖5 Lewis

Erenberg presents a similar foundation, stating that ―swing symbolized a major reorientation in American national culture;‖ claiming that, ―for many of its most devoted fans, the music expressed a new model of a pluralist democracy capable of challenging

3 Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine, 25. 4 David Stowe, Swing Changes: Big Band Jazz and New Deal America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 13. 5 Stowe, Swing Changes, 72-73. 4 classical music for the mantle of cultural legitimacy and American national identity.‖6

Casting a foundation for the study of music, New Jazz Scholars utilize jazz to define the cultural consciousness of the New Deal era, manifesting the art form‘s democratic aesthetic in both the melting pot of the sound and the interracial harmony of the band. Critically shaping central ideas of citizenship and identity in African-American culture these explorations of the democratic tropes of jazz vividly determine the trajectory of racial politics as the soundtrack and performance of jazz symbolized, and in some cases, reflected the progressive coalitions indicative of the Popular Front era. This dissertation absorbs the legitimacy of these principles but emphasizes that the pervasive racialized constraints of minstrelsy has complicated the democratic vision of jazz held by New Jazz scholars. As this dissertation will argue, the compositional fabric and public discourse concerning

―Reminiscing‖ points towards the intrinsically racialized definitions historically placed upon jazz, complicating the egalitarian metaphor and motif of jazz as democratic.

Additionally within the scholarship of New Jazz Studies, Scott DeVeaux‘s work acts to revise Martin Williams‘ prior notion of the ―jazz tradition‖ and the decades of formal jazz analyses that, as declared by John Gennari, have adhered to, ―the Romantic tragic view of jazz.‖7 DeVeaux‘s work, along with that of Stowe, Erenberg, Denning, and

6 Lewis A. Erenberg, Swingin‟ the Dream (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), xiii. 7 Gennari continues, commenting on British critic Geoff Dyer, that, ―The tradition of jazz criticism per se, as it has come to be known, Dyer does not explicitly engage—with the result that he fails to acknowledge that his imaginative criticism is crucially dependent on anecdotes, notions, images, and arguments that have come from the trench work of jazz critics. Dyer is an adherent of the Romantic Tragic view of jazz, one that likens Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Eric Dolphy to Shelly, Keats, and Shubert, seeing in all both a talent ‗consuming itself even as it flourishes‘ and the grounds for an argument that ‗premature death is a condition of creativity.‖ John Gennari, Blowin‟ Hot and Cool (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 7. 5 Gennari have issued a conceptual framework that, according to DeVeaux, isolates jazz from the politics of culture and society as ―an autonomous art form…subject to its own aesthetic principles and laws of development rather than to forces of the marketplace.‖8

Moreover, the revisionist work of New Jazz Studies interprets the effects of music on culture from a broader range of sources, incorporating oral histories, printed sources and other non-musical data in order to draw upon what Gennari classifies as ―the jazz superstructure,‖ with an analysis consisting not just of the art and the musicians, but the audience and the critics alike.9

DeVeaux‘s critique of the ―jazz tradition‖ offers a revisionist perspective that declares jazz musicians as ―similarly high-minded, pursing their artistic vision in serene disregard of commercial considerations.‖10 DeVeaux proclaims this assertion in order to re-imagine the agency of the musicians of the swing era from a perspective that works to incorporate the realities of the Popular Front ideological shifts—realities that allowed for the advancement of African-American cultural politics and the expression of these ideas in the commercialized age of the New Deal.11 DeVeaux‘s work thus reclaims the insistent commercialization of jazz in spite of the ―consistent themes in writing about jazz‖ that projects commercialism as both ―demonizing,‖ and ―a corrupting influence.‖12 DeVeaux‘s work challenges the critical rendering of ―envisioning jazz as a privileged sphere,‖

8 Scott DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 13. 9 Gennari states: ―Critics, historians, educators, and other members of the ‗jazz superstructure‘ often embrace ‗static models of jazz‘ because doing so simplifies their job of making sense of the complex world of improvisation.‖ Gennari, Blowin‟ Hot and Cool, 4. 10 DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop, 13. 11 DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop, 13. 12 DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop, 13. 6 proposing instead, that, ―by the height of the Swing Era in the late 1930s, when jazz (or swing) had become clearly visible to at least a determined minority as both an artistic activity, and the object of cultural enthusiasm, the ties that bound jazz musicians to the networks of the culture industry were even more obvious.‖13 Similarly, DeVeaux and other scholars have set forth to re-envision and reformulate the template of jazz criticism in order to reveal the significance that ideological shifts, particularly represented in the amalgamated politics of the New Deal, afford in the conceptualization of swing era jazz.14

The jazz of the era, and its musicians, serve as the representational result of the New Deal movement itself, literally forming a body of work that ideologically amalgamates and stylistically matures alongside the progressive trajectory of New Deal politics.

My work in this dissertation stems from this elastic rubric of study but specifically expands upon the work of swing era new jazz scholars by pointing to another demonstration of the expression of agency among black public intellectuals through the individual work of ―Reminiscing in Tempo,‖ and, later, with the compositions of Miles

Davis and Ornette Coleman. The focus of chapter one and again, specifically in chapter four, is to solidify the sonic in the study of jazz and culture, and to explore how tropes of music theory provide a useful narrative of history, race, and politics. Therefore, this project interrupts jazz studies to recuperate the sonic, forging an analysis that interprets how

13 DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop, 13. 14 Gennari states, ―in what has emerged as a clarion call for jazz scholars across the disciplines, the music historian Scott DeVeaux wrote in 1991 that ‗the time has come for an approach that is less invested in the ideology of jazz as an aesthetic object and more responsive to issues of historical particularity.‖ Gennari, Blowin‟ Hot and Cold, 13. 7 compositional format, aurality, musical technique, and innovation voice a textualized and accessible mode of expression in the communication of political ideals.15

This dissertation also recuperates the sonic to recognize the ideological works presented within the specific musical components of jazz of the swing era. Further validating the progressive radicalism of individual swing pieces—pieces formerly presumed as stylistically and ideologically identical in the pantheon of the genre—the distinctive composition of Ellington‘s piece performs this ideological work as the creation, recording, performance, and reception of ―Reminiscing‖ reorganized perceptions and discourses concerning race and racial politics both at home and abroad. In Ellington‘s case, his politics, like those of most black artists remained publically non-distinct, preferring an artistic discourse over an outright display of political rhetoric. However, as a result of his artistic works—works which went on to shape the scope of his public endeavors—

Ellington‘s coiled political trajectory is straightened through his musical process. And in doing so, Ellington‘s piece serves as an ideological touchstone in the reorganization of jazz to create a functional language through its musical dialogue that reflected the strands of

15 Of particular note concerning the sonic is this dissertation‘s intervention from Michael Denning‘s, The Cultural Front. Denning‘s detailed argument examines the myriad of Popular Front movements on the part of the American proletariat that contributed to massive social and class upheaval in the 1930's. Denning asks why the Left had a powerful and ―unprecedented impact on U.S. culture in the 1930‘s,‖ and refutes the idea of the Cultural Front as a ―product of individual political commitment,‖ and instead argues that mass social movements of education, labor, and education, effected the most significant change during the era. Denning‘s theoretical stake locates the Popular Front as a ―historical bloc,‖ and recognizes the cultural politics and aesthetic ideologies that were shaped by this perspective. Beyond Denning‘s virtually encompassing treatment of the 1930‘s, my dissertation focuses on jazz and extends the chronological parameters of his argument. In essence, my intervention with Denning‘s analysis specifically investigates the composition, playing, and sonic practice of music, and how a musical language informs the dialogue concerning political radicalism on a level tantamount to verbal art. Michael 8 modernized political discourse circulating amongst African-American creative intellectuals—strands that publically navigated through the constraints of minstrelsy and segregation presented by the industry of swing and mainstream American culture. And strands that eventually established a functional musical dialogue for the further transmission of Leftist political culture amongst African-American creative intellectuals in the 1930s.

Generally speaking, this dissertation is about the different moments that shape the discourse of jazz performance. And that discourse is ultimately determined by the various settings of minstrelsy emerging throughout the 20th century that functioned to dictate the intellectual, expressive, aesthetic, and political scope of black art. In this dissertation, minstrelsy describes an existent racialized structure and social dynamic that accompanies the visual history provided by blackface theater to discursively subjugate African-

American artistry. My dissertation conjugates the numerous conceptual uses of this term, identifying the separate ―minstrel milieus‖ of the various decades that addressed the differing historical conditions and visualizations of minstrelsy effecting the production and discernment of black art.16 This dissertation unpacks minstrelsy as a conceptual racialized

Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997), xvii. 16 My study will also specifically ask the reader to compartmentalize black U.S. history into musical periods in the attempt to argue that musical expression constitutes a specified political, social, and cultural space and plays a role in contextualizing the linear and historical aspects of African-American life. Amiri Baraka gives precedent to this approach by specifying that African-American life is of course effected by, but remains outside the parameters of the mainstream. In Blues People, Baraka notes for example how the Depression was ―experienced by the Negro,‖ but ultimately how these encompassing societal events served as an insular catalyst for the ―contemporary expression of the Negro Soul,‖ and specifically how black music survived and progressed through these societal hardships. Music therefore provides a constant and epistemological force in the sustained function of African-American life. When history typically points to massive historical 9 setting specific to American culture. Understanding minstrelsy as a system of thought outside of the historical litmus of blackface characterization, this dissertation employs terms such as minstrelized ―surroundings,‖ ―constraints,‖ and ―character‖ to express the encompassing cultural, societal qualities, and personal effects of this racially oppressive domain.

The encompassing domain of minstrelsy, on one hand, can be understood using a

Foucauldian model, as the domain partially represents what Foucault perceives as the

―permanent, repetitious, inert, and self-reproducing‖ force of power that defines discourse.17 Taking it a step further, Judith Butler analyzes the power dynamics involved in sex and gender construction through constant performativity, repetition, and ritual, where gender norms become naturalized over the course of this persistent discourse.18 Within this schema, minstrelsy could be understood to function as a performative act—not just in the sense of deliberate blackface performance, but in the naturalized performativity that the act produces on the part of African-Americans whereas blacks interact within the realm of minstrelsy as naturalized, racialized figures. Minstrelsy also functions within a

Foucauldian/Butler diagnosis as a productive, discursive power that works broadly as a

events from the Depression to WW2, African-American life is often marginalized by this discourse as being simply affected by these world events. And as a strident example of radical intellectualism, music must not be looked upon simply as a reaction to world events and its effects on African-Americans—it instead usefully provides a unique, viable, and un- effected gateway towards a specifically African-American ideological language. LeRoi Jones [Imamu Amiri Baraka], Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: Quill / William Morrow, 1971), 118-119. 17 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1(New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 93. 18 See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993). 10 societal matrix—permeating, influencing, and dictating elements of black culture as its subjects are racialized, and therefore, naturalized within fixed categories of identity.

However, it must be stated that a consistent critique of Foucault lies in his disregard for racial theory in the formulation of his analysis. Marx is also criticized for this omission; however, the structure of a Marxist analysis on oppression and liberation lends itself to a specified understanding of the pursuit of black creative intellectuals, their desire for tangible, realized freedoms, and their liberating breaks from the system of oppression presented by minstrelsy. Ultimately, a Foucauldian analysis fails to properly categorize the challenges to minstrelsy presented by African-Americans due to Foucault‘s disbelief in intentionality or a resistive consciousness against systems of power—as this failure is highlighted by the realized and vocalized actions, thoughts, and results of black creative intellectuals. Instead, the basis of Foucauldian analysis posits that these forms of resistance represent a brief rupture within the system of power, and that ultimately produces or reinforces the same or identical oppressive system. The environment created by the system of minstrelsy, and the reactions and cultural forms produced by black creative intellectuals in response to minstrelsy coincide with the fundamentals presented in Marx‘s belief in actualized liberation. Further falling into a Marxist theoretical rubric, Marx speaks of reification as a process of applying living characteristics, qualities, and abilities to abstract ideas or non-living objects. Jazz, therefore, presents itself as a reified tool in this struggle against minstrelsy, potentially liberating artists from oppressive boundaries through its expressive, intellectual practice.19

19 See Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (Second Edition) (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978). 11 This dissertation imagines jazz as a discourse that can be interpreted, thus producing narrative voices that disrupt, challenge, or resolve the totalizing domain of minstrelsy. Centrally, this project maintains that a political, ―counter-minstrel narrative,‖ rather than being an ancillary function of, or simply an assumed corollary, has been a central trope through which the music of jazz has been composed, conceptualized, and expressed by African-American artists. The counter-minstrel narrative is a theoretical device employed throughout this dissertation that expresses the efforts of black creative public intellectuals to circumvent the racist constraints presented by minstrelsy. Broadly, this term emerges at specific moments in the discourse of jazz, and this dissertation employs the term as a device to survey the jazz field for the various instances in which the music presents a tangible response to the confines of minstrelsy.

The counter-minstrel narrative in this project is concerned with the politics of the sonic and specifically, how jazz artists articulate a realm of sound that changes the racially- subjugated perception of the musician. With ―Reminiscing,‖ Ellington creates a regime of sound that is very different from the minstrelized swing of his peers and his own earlier works. The work of chapter one will reveal this sound of minstrelsy and will situate

Ellington‘s piece as a response to these artistic, intellectual, racial, and ultimately political constraints. The counter-minstrel narrative therefore is identified through these sonic displays, determined primarily by the innovative qualities of musical composition that demarcate a space from the pervasively minstrelized music of the field. This dissertation locates Ellington, Miles Davis, and Ornette Coleman as the primary purveyors of this activist narrative as determined by the significance of their compositional innovations.

This dissertation does not exclude without exception the multiple, distinct, contributions of

12 other artists, specifically the improvisational techniques mastered by those involved with the Kansas City pre-bop movement and Charlie Parker in the 1940s.. Instead, this dissertation centers its discussion of the counter-minstrel narrative with the musicians primarily noted for their advancements in jazz composition (not necessarily jazz improvisation), focusing on that intellectual history as a guide for the counter-minstrel narrative.

Through the use of narrative, this dissertation provides an interpretive strategy for music that bridges the foundational concepts indicative of musical theory with terms specific to cultural history in order to unpack and expose the musical language that represents the discourse of radicalism amongst black public intellectuals. This convergence of terms refocuses the lens in which we dissect, process, and discern the narrative history of black radical politics. By a process of conceptualizing race within the field of music, this dissertation works to implicate both the performance of race and the display of political intentionalities within the history of music and the production of sound. Ultimately, the goals for this dissertation is to further project the study of race outside the visual and literary realm in order to conceptualize musical theory and musical performance as viable texts for the discussion of black radical politics and the cultural endeavors of black public intellectuals.

With these goals in view, the chapters seek to answer questions regarding the productive uses music has for the discussion of history, and in particular, how the tropes of music concerning harmony, melody, and rhythm could contribute to a discourse about the politics of black public intellectuals? Additionally, by signifying the musician as a historian, and the music as the historical narrative, the chapters also seek to answer broader

13 queries that ask what a musician can contribute that is unique to the narratives of history and race? These questions frame the general scope of my analysis, as my study is less about a discussion of lyrics or an itinerant history that details the actual performances of jazz since the 1930s. Instead, this study is more about the music itself, in terms of calculating the defining points in jazz innovation that occurred in the 20th century as well as the various components of musical theory that unlock a narrative of African-American social and political culture.

Theoretically, this dissertation rationally intervenes in the current discussions of temporality as a way of excavating a narrative of history within the practice of the music and in order to investigate this dissertation‘s claims of music translating and transmitting political and social ideology. In Michael Klein‘s article, ―Chopin‘s Fourth Ballade as

Musical Narrative,‖ Klein traces temporal shifts as indicators of narrativity and works to repulse the commonplace contentions that argue against specified narrativity in music by claiming ―that there is nothing in the music per se that allows it to point unambiguously to actions or characters.‖20 Klein presents a breakdown of Chopin‘s piece, investigating its discursive possibilities by putting forth an argument that embraces the possibility of music to deliver a predesigned emotional narrative through a consideration of Raymond

Monelle‘s use of temporality.21 Klein details Monelle‘s argument of temporality, stating in musical terms that there are ―two types of time signified in the music of this period: lyric and narrative.‖ Klein continues:

20 Michael Klein, ―Chopin‘s Fourth Ballade as Musical Narrative,‖ Music Theory Spectrum 26, no. 1, (Spring, 2004): 23. 21 See Raymond Monelle, The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 14 Lyric time is signified in those presentational sections in which melody comes to the fore, and in which harmonic and phrase structures are relatively stable. Narrative time is signified in those sections in which harmonic and phrase structures become more complex, and in which there is generally an increase in rhythmic activity.22

Providing the idea that differing narratives emerge in different sections of a musical piece,

Klein‘s analysis pinpoints moments in compositional technique that work to structure a narrative voice in non-lyrical music.

The chapters of this dissertation follow the logic behind this thesis, and examine the political content of the music itself, intervening with current discussions of temporality in particular with chapter one‘s focus on Ellington‘s recalibration of rhythmic feel in the genre of swing. Emphasizing the rhythmic components of harmony, Ellington‘s innovations uncover a relevant societal and political narrative function or ―musical language,‖ as his progressive jazz was created not only as a detailed account of the musicians‘ sadness over the passing of his mother, but also as a documented response of the longstanding, minstrelized musical, professional, and societal restrictions that caged the aesthetic scope of his art. The negative reception of his piece after its release also grants narrative meaning as the artistic totality of his piece was stringently categorized by a racialized format. With ―Reminiscing in Tempo‖ facing criticism for betraying the musical elements indicative of swing and traditional black popular art, a politicized narrative is constructed as Ellington consciously began to stray outside of the controls of minstrelsy.

Chapter one begins by identifying a specific moment in the music itself, where this piece was composed in a cumulative response to the artistic, social, economic, cultural, and racial trappings placed upon it by the critics, managers, label executives, and general record

22 Klein, ―Chopin‘s Fourth Ballade as Musical Narrative,‖ 23-25. 15 buying public. Written to express the grief over his mother‘s passing, Duke Ellington‘s

―Reminiscing in Tempo,‖ signifies the primary moment where jazz articulated a defining political narrative by betraying the conventions of minstrelized form with its innovative musical design. This chapter identifies the composition of ―Reminiscing in Tempo‖ as this touchstone moment in jazz history and immediately debunks the standard apolitical stance employed by jazz artists with an excavation of the political and politicized content of

Ellington‘s artistic and cultural works. Much of the jazz before and during the 1930s was good-time swing in a post-rag tradition developed from the pop template provided by Tin

Pan Alley. The more serious tone of jazz developed amidst the plethora of popular swing with the efforts of Ellington and a select few who began to compose long-form suites in order to concertize the swing genre with classically derived sonic elements. This chapter identifies ―Reminiscing in Tempo‖ out of the collection due to its musical innovations and the uncommon politicized nature of its critical reception. Ellington‘s piece transitions from the racial, artistic, and aesthetic boundaries presented in swing and his own jungle music to exist as a point of definition in the reorganization of jazz—creating a musical language that reflected the modernized public political consciousness of African-Americans that rejected minstrelized stereotypes and the racially structured parameters of mainstream culture. With

Ellington‘s piece producing political resonance from its viable and politicized musical language, Ellington‘s work in this period provides a starting point for the larger discussion concerning the impact of the counter-minstrel narrative and the outward expressions of radicalism in the art of black creative intellectuals.

The majority of the second chapter explores the period just following

―Reminiscing;‖ however, chapter two‘s focus shifts between the teens to the early 1940s to

16 supply a detailed analytical history of the various physical and discursive settings where this counter-minstrel narrative developed and took shape. Chapter two describes how the music became politicized on the ground level, specifically tracing how (and eventually where) jazz was utilized in the public expression of leftist politics. This chapter departs slightly from the methodology presented in chapter one and shifts the analysis towards a more historical outlook to provide the necessary background to the racially conscious

Marxist strategies that greatly influenced the public discourse and creative works of black public intellectuals. To clarify, the counter-minstrel narrative was already supplied by

Ellington as detailed in chapter one, and as a result, jazz‘s political context became more readily identifiable (and accessible) amongst public intellectuals. Picking up on this political current within the music, the Left began to employ jazz to publically display its radical politics. Therefore, this chapter examines the role of the Left in the development of the art and public spheres of black creative intellectuals in the New Deal.

This investigation adds historical weight to this dissertation‘s claims about the politicized counter-minstrel narrative. This investigation details the ways in which the

Left, and specifically, the Communist Party, influenced black public intellectuals and how this Marxist radicalism was developed and eventually carried forth sonically through the various channels of media and musical venues that became viable and expressive pathways for the transmission of progressive anti-racist politics. The idea for this chapter stems in part from an observation made by St. Clair Drake in 1932, who broadly claimed that he scarcely knew of any black intellectuals ―who privately or publicly didn‘t claim to be some

17 kind of Marxist.‖23 Recognizing Marxism as the dominant political discourse, this chapter identifies Marxism‘s pervasive influence and practice amongst black public intellectuals and observes how this ideology structured a political trajectory for jazz music of the New

Deal.24 This chapter, however, maintains an important distinction that distinguishes between black creative intellectuals who were Marxists and those who simply drew on it creatively and whose artistic activism was facilitated by its broad cultural resonance.

Investigating close as well as distant associations, this chapter by no means defines all public intellectuals (including jazz artists) as Marxists. Instead, this chapter investigates the creative process through which jazz engaged and worked through Marxist political ideals and social thought (directly and indirectly) as it emerged as a popular and attractive political perspective almost simultaneously with the New Negro Renaissance and other artistic ―modernisms.‖ This chapter also investigates the creative process through which jazz was discursively and sonically transformed into an increasingly radical, politically charged art form.

23 Nikhil Singh, ―Retracing the Black-Red Thread, American Literary History‖ American Literary History 15, no. 4, (Winter, 2003): 830. 24 Anthony Dawahare comments on the Marxist dynamic of the 1930s and specifies how it functioned in the amalgamated and competing political ideologies of the New Deal. Dawahare points out the Marxist underpinnings of black literature, stating: ―I also argue that the strongest black writers of the period are precisely those who did not heed the call of nationalism and were, on the contrary, receptive to the internationalist ideas of the American and European Left. Understanding that receptivity implies availability, I demonstrate that it is during the ―Red Decade‖ that black writers developed some of the sharpest critiques of nationalism. Black Communist writers, as well as their white comrades (most of whom are out of the purview of this study), historically anticipate a growing body of contemporary scholarship that reveals the intellectual vapidity and political hazards of nationalism, especially its ability to generate feelings of grandeur in return for the working class's cooperation in an exploitative peace or an imperialist war.‖ Furthermore, Dawahare specifies that his work ―demonstrates the dominance of nationalism in the 1920s and Marxism in the 1930s.‖ Anthony Dawahare , Marxism and 18 The content of chapter three chronologically follows the analysis presented in the second chapter and examines the developing, internationally inspired political content and counter- minstrel identity of jazz in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Essentially, this chapter tells the story of jazz‘s developing and increasingly public political identity, and investigates how the musician‘s augmented exposure to the global community and the fatigue of government sponsored segregation increased their efforts to voice their developing expressive agency.

The counter-minstrel identity emphasized in this chapter stems from and continues the work of the counter-minstrel narrative, articulating a regime of artistry and sound that contests the racist parameters of minstrelsy. The counter-minstrel identity, however, is measured as an outcome of the narrative‘s lasting effect on the jazz scene, displaying the augmented politicized agency of black artists influenced by the potential freedoms of the foreign stage, and the increased public narrative of American civil rights during the Cold

War. Displayed in internationally renowned artists such as Paul Robeson and Louis

Armstrong, the counter-minstrel identity is also presented in this chapter as a response to the increased surveillance enacted upon black artists suspected of ―Communist subversion‖ under the Cold War social controls of the U.S. government.

Chapter three follows a similar methodology to chapter two by concentrating on a series of shifts and occurrences that further shape the politicized discourse of jazz performance. This chapter analyzes jazz artists, who, by the 1950s, gained a voice on the world stage and evaluates how this global prominence augmented and influenced their increasingly defiant response to the minstrel milieu. Speaking out against racism to the

American and global community, the black musician‘s role as witness and historian is

African American Literature between the Wars: A New Pandora's Box (Mississippi: 19 analyzed as a broader symptom of the counter-minstrel identity. Ultimately, this chapter also previews the increased reactions of the mainstream community to this counter-minstrel activity. And with the U.S. government also picking up on the political current within the music, the problematic relationship between the U.S. government and black creative public intellectuals during the Cold War is exposed and investigated through an analysis of government records that closely observe the ―subversive‖ Communist threat purportedly posed by black artists.

The presentation of chapter four‘s analysis resembles that of chapter one, focusing primarily on the sonic and cultural contributions of a single artist in response to his minstrel milieu. Investigating Miles Davis and his cultural and artistic influence on the free jazz of the 1960s, this dissertation completes its theoretical arc by positioning Davis as a ―sonic legatee‖ of Ellington and an artist who deconstructs the racist confines of minstrelsy with his post-minstrel identity. Outlined in my analysis, the post-minstrel identity represents the sonic and cultural efforts of jazz to resolve minstrelsy. With the first three chapters locating excursions and steps to navigate through the oppressive realm of minstrelsy, chapter four positions Davis as a primary model for the liberating force indicative of the post-minstrel identity. Parallel to this discussion of minstrelsy, this chapter traces the demise of Communism and post-Depression black Marxism and the ideological reconfiguration expressed through the broader tenets of Black Nationalism that mapped the subsequent sonic expressions of jazz in the post-WWII period.

University Press of Mississippi, 2003), xii. 20

Chapter 1: “The Duke Steps Out of the Jungle;” Race, Minstrelsy, and the Counter- Minstrel Narrative of “Reminiscing in Tempo.”

In 1935, bandleader, composer, and pianist Edward Kennedy ―Duke‖ Ellington recorded a long form, four-suite piece entitled, ―Reminiscing in Tempo,‖ in memory of his beloved mother Daisy who succumbed to cancer on May 27th of the same year.1 Although having previously experimented with extended works, this specific piece was a stylistic departure for Ellington, eschewing the standard three minute song format in favor of an original piece that juxtaposed the theoretical foundations behind improvisational jazz with the formatted orchestral discipline of classical and theatrical music.2 For the ever dashing and cosmopolitan musician, the harmonic complexity and distinctive format of his four- suite piece matched the inimitable, trendsetting style of his effortlessly regal public persona.3 With his new piece standing in direct artistic contrast to the popular swing of his

1 For additional information on ―Reminiscing in Tempo,‖ see John Hasse‘s Beyond Category. Hasse also states, ―Ellington wrote Reminiscing in Tempo in the summer of 1935 to reflect on his beloved mother‘s death. He said that the manuscript was stained with tears.‖ John Hasse, Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 192. 2 His prior extended work was 1931s ―Creole Rhapsody.‖ His later works included 1937s ―Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue‖ and 1943s ―Black Brown and Beige.‖ I have mentioned ―orchestral discipline‖ in terms of illustrating the rigidly formatted nature of Ellington‘s composition. With this piece for example, Ellington and his orchestra are strictly reading the notes, however Ellington himself is quick to point out that his compositions of this era were purely ―negroid,‖ in origin, ―weaving a musical thread which runs parallel to the history of the American Negro.‖ Paul Allen Anderson, Deep River (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 267. 3 In A.J. Bishop, ― ‗Reminiscing in Tempo‘: A Landmark in Jazz Composition, Bishop‘s useful evaluation of Ellington‘s work breaks down the unique layout of the piece into three sections that accompany and identify the piece‘s varying moods. Bishop comments: ―It was certainly attempt to break through the limitations of the 78-rpm record…Improvisation, which plays such a large part in jazz, needs a simple framework; and no one has provided a better framework for it than Duke. However, there is no reason why a composition should be tied to four bar phrases and thirty-two bar AABA section. Duke realized this much earlier. In Creole Rhapsody, he used five bar phrases. In 21 peers, Ellington traversed the boundaries of his minstrelized surroundings—producing a sound, style, and identity that contradicted the predetermined and often pejorative mainstream interpretation of African-American art, tradition, and community.4

Gained in part from the dues paid on the jazz circuit at home and abroad, his augmented wealth of cultural and musical influences, and his growing distaste for the thematic trappings placed upon his work by the mainstream audience, the piece was publicized by Ellington himself as an example of an emergent personal awareness within his art and craft.5 An awareness centered in his desire for complete artistic freedom in both the modern musical scene and a modern American society that routinely dictated the scope, purpose, and depth of his art according to a predetermined set of financial, artistic, and indeed, racialized limitations.6 In his biographical work on Ellington, jazz historian John

Reminiscing in Tempo, this idea is carried much further.‖ A.J. Bishop, ―Reminiscing in Tempo‘: A Landmark in Jazz Composition,‖ Jazz Journal 17, no. 2, (1964): 5-6. 4 These ―minstrelized surroundings‖ will be described throughout the chapter. The surroundings generally pertain not only to the artistic scope of African-American endeavors, but rather the gamut of black public culture and life. In Love and Theft, Eric Lott hints at these surroundings and the cumulative effects of minstrelsy as part of the ―racist logic‖ that was created and sustained by the minstrel show that staged, ―racial categories, boundaries, and types‖ in American popular, social, and political culture. Lott‘s analysis gives voice to the notion of minstrelized surroundings by acknowledging that a ―racist logic‖ ultimately supported the fraudulent and constructed character of blackness that forged the mainstream popular identity of African-Americans and diluted the creative output of creative black intellectuals in the process. Eric Lott, Love and Theft (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 36. 5 Reflecting on this sentiment, his compositions, and his complex relations with the audience and critics of 1930‘s, Ellington commented on these changing roles in a 1964 self-penned article. Ellington: ―Out of this came, I think, a closer relationship between the listener and player, even a degree of intimacy. That is, more people came to regard the musician on the stand as a human being rather than a uniformed figure producing agreeable sounds.‖ Duke Ellington, ―Reminiscing in Tempo,‖ Down Beat, July 2, 1964, 8-9. 6 Nikhil Singh offers an interesting perspective on these ―limitations,‖ with an analysis designed to describe racial climate of the New Deal era as it pertained to the ―black political actors,‖ who ―faced a world defined by competing versions of capitalist imperialism…and a nation-state organized around herrenvolk republicanism.‖ To clarify, 22 Edward Hasse provides a useful overview of the piece within the pantheon of Ellington‘s work, commenting that ―Reminiscing‖ was the grandest piece he had yet written,‖ that signaled ―an effort by Ellington to break out of the commercial realm, just as he fought to break musical barriers and limitations.‖7 Specifying these artistic goals, Ellington affirmed with ―Reminiscing,‖ his core belief ―in musical experimentation,‖ surmising that, ―to stand still musically is the equivalent to losing ground.‖8 Hasse summarizes the importance of the piece to both Ellington and the jazz scene by positioning ―Reminiscing‖ outside of the more commercial and socially trivial categories commonly reserved for popular music and

African-American artistry.9 Hasse states:

Singh describes the antiracist works of black public figures but also cites the augmented stature and cumulative power of ―whiteness‖ that in fact, gives voice to my use of the term ―limitations.‖ Singh states, ―in fact, whiteness was arguably solidified as a structure of privilege during this period,‖ further claiming that, ―the power of whiteness was enhanced by it mutability in a context of national and global expansion, even as the idea of blackness was more powerfully fixed as its antithesis.‖ Nikhil Singh, Black is a Country (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004), 31-32. 7 Hasse, Beyond Category, 187. 8 As stated by Ellington in Hasse, Beyond Category, 187. Additionally, the Baltimore Afro-American ran a 3 page story about the static quality of Tin Pan Alley produced songs and how the ―politics and big business,‖ of the music industry worked ―in league to rob composers of their creations.‖ The piece adds that by 1935, ―music has been industrialized and tunes have become a basic commodity,‖ and cites Ellington as typical songwriter afflicted by regulatory production methods of the industry. ―Tin Pan Alley Sings the Blues,‖ Baltimore Afro-American, November 2, 1935, 8. 9 A.J. Bishop‘s 1964 article works to emphasize the structural distinctions of the piece, suggesting that the form of the composition could be divided into three separate harmonically and thematically unique parts. Bishop‘s analysis begins by acknowledging the strong criticisms applied to the piece, yet offers that, ―not only was the piece the most ambitious jazz composition, in terms of length, attempted up till that time, but it contained, as we shall see, some unconventional ideas.‖ Bishop‘s proclamation of ―Reminiscing‘s‖ unconventionality focuses on the thematic components offered in the 3 sections, with harmonic changes, antiphony (call and response), and tempo shifts evoking a variety of moods from ―forward movement,‖ ―elegiacal‖ and ―somber introspection.‖ Proclaiming ―Reminiscing,‖ as ―the most ambitious jazz composition of the era,‖ Bishop‘s structural analysis provides insight towards the careful interplay between improvisation and formatted orchestral dynamics that work to produce narrativity in the piece. This interplay 23 Reminiscing in Tempo‘ announced to the world that Duke Ellington, the composer, was diverging in even more pronounced ways from big-band jazz of the time— moving beyond the expected, beyond the category of jazz. These works proved again that with brilliant compositions and orchestrations a jazz orchestra could express a wide variety of emotions. Breaking through more restrictions that industry and society placed upon all musicians—black and white—who worked in jazz, these works hinted that Ellington had even more interesting ideas in store for the future.10

Amidst the expressive nature of his summation, Hasse cites the critical feature of

Ellington‘s latest work by clarifying the piece‘s artistic divergence from the swing of the era. Illustrating this divergence, Hasse importantly suggests the potential of utility and narrativity inherent to this specific piece; tropes commonly associated with classical and operatic music. Referencing ―Reminiscing‘s‖ ability to ―break through restrictions,‖ and move, ―beyond the category of jazz,‖ Hasse declares a social functionality to the piece contemporaneous to both the radical non-commercial art and circulating political aspirations of the era. With ‗Reminiscing‖ musically ―moving beyond the expected,‖ by rupturing the ever present sonic and racial boundaries inflicted upon black artists through an overhaul of swing jazz, the piece functioned to concurrently express the emotional and political articulations of radical African-American public intellectuals concerned with the cause of black freedom. Hasse therefore introduces with ―Reminiscing‖ an example of music not only clearing an artistic path within the jazz scene but importantly hints at the creation of a blueprint for a musical language that operates discursively to express the

created a work unconventional to jazz forms at the time and was indicative of Ellington‘s changing artistic and perspective. Bishop‘s summation concludes, stating, ―Reminiscing is completely different from any other jazz of the middle thirties. Not only in form, but the sound, has very little in common with other jazz of the period.‖ Bishop‘s attention to the piece‘s harmonic and rhythmic variations serves as a relative precursor for my analysis, as this chapter will investigate Ellington‘s recalibration of harmonic structure to serve as an alternative output of rhythm, thus expanding the rhythmic and overall sonic possibilities of swing jazz. A.J. Bishop, ―Reminiscing in Tempo,‖ 5-6. 24 larger politicized desires of the era. And although Hasse‘s references to the ―restrictions‖ of ―industry and society‖ remain somewhat vague, it importantly suggests the notion of a musical piece serving as a literal, functional device, capable of performing ideological work in the face of the racialized social and political constraints presented by racism and minstrelsy.

This chapter will discuss how Ellington‘s jazz in the early to mid 1930s performed this work, culminating with the construction of ―Reminiscing‖ as the principal counter- minstrel narrative that indirectly absorbed leftist modalities of social critique and activism, specifically the anti-racist social endeavors and reformatory political interests expressed by

African-Americans public intellectuals during the New Deal. Marked by his transition from his jungle style and repulsion of the minstrelized applications of popular swing, this chapter analyzes the cultural and aesthetic output of Ellington‘s total work and frames it within the current trajectories of leftist politics to investigate how Ellington‘s piece established jazz as mode of interpreting and producing the circulating ideology of the emergent public and activist culture of the Popular Front. This public culture consisted of the corps of literary and performance artists referred to by Michael Denning as the ―strong cultural superstructure in New York,‖ and the ranks of the ―Harlem Left‖ invested in campaigns of radical racial, labor, and judicial reform.11 And within this setting, this analysis begins the process of determining jazz‘s unique role in the transmission of the

10 Hasse, Beyond Category, 187. 11 Denning, The Cultural Front, 15. 25 ideology that was composed through these loose alliances of Leftist intellectuals, artists, political and labor leaders during the New Deal era.12

With ‗Reminiscing,‘ Ellington‘s work establishes a point of definition for conceptualizing jazz as an ideological device that communicated through a counter- minstrel narrative the anti-racist, liberal humanism that clarified the political and social works of black public intellectuals in the 1930s. Campaigning against a broad spectrum of hegemonic social controls, the works of black public intellectuals confronted the systematic and cultural roots of American racism, producing ideological and material resistance in the form of creative expression, activism and legislature that vigorously opposed the widespread poverty, violence and segregated oppression faced by African-Americans in rural and urban communities.13 Alongside the ranks of politicians, activists, and writers, select musicians associatively emerged as public intellectuals who produced sonic strands

12 Denning‘s analysis dives deeply into the core of this superstructure, stating, ―the Harlem Popular Front also had deep roots in African American cultural circles.‖ Denning lists, ―the prominence of Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes and the young Richard Wright,‖ as part of the African-American wing of the emergent ―lefty tradition,‖ and the progenitors of ―a racial revolution that inaugurated a postmodern racial regime.‖ Importantly, Denning also cites Duke Ellington in terms that give insight towards his role of eliminating preconceived artistic and racial barriers in the pursuit of his artistic and cultural agenda, stating, ―as a result, the popular arts no longer seemed a sometimes quaint, sometimes vulgar enclave that could be safely ignored.‖ Denning, The Cultural Front, 43. 13 This activism came in spite of the halted legislature and denial of protections on the basis of race. Nikhil Singh offers, ―for three decades, reformist and putatively race- neutral social policies formulated in the New Deal era actually reinforced and expanded numerous racial disparities.‖ Singh continues that, ―those denied protection under the Social Security Act of 1935 were disproportionately black farm workers and black and female domestic workers living in the South. Despite institutionalizing collective bargaining and a host of new protections to trade unions, the 1935 Wagner Act did nothing to stop existing union practices of racial discrimination and exclusion. After the creation of the Federal Housing Authority in 1937, appraisers used race as an evaluative tool.‖ Additionally, notwithstanding the 1930 announcement of the NAACP to end lynching, the Costigan-Wagner Anti-Lynching bill drawn by the Senators Edward Costigan and Robert 26 of resistance to these same social controls. Articulating the ideals and radical designs of the circulating anti-racist, black Marxist-oriented politics of the New Deal, this sonic resistance was produced by the very practice and public presentation of artistic works expressly composed to contest the racially and ideologically restrictive boundaries presented by minstrelsy. As the hegemony of minstrelsy limited and regulated the creative and intellectual possibilities of swing, the sonic resistance of the 1930s was identified by specific musical works that employed theoretical musical innovations to circumvent the minstrelized classifications that determined the artistic and social scope of the swing genre.

With the presentation of ―Reminiscing,‖ Ellington serves as a primary example of this black public creative intellectual, producing sonic and cultural work that implemented a modernized field of jazz composition that further rebuked the racialized trappings placed upon swing. And with ―Reminiscing,‖ Ellington continued his construction of a public persona that articulated a viable challenge to the visual marginalization of African-

Americans presented through minstrel stereotype. Unearthing the political significance of jazz innovations to traditional musical components such as rhythm, harmony, and tonality,

Ellington‘s ―Reminiscing,‖ emerged in 1935 as a highly controversial yet strident culmination of modernized jazz technique, clarifying the circulating tenets of anti-racist ideology by rejecting the encompassing practices of minstrelsy on the practice, display, and discernment of black art.

Summarizing Duke Ellington‘s work, A.J. Bishop‘s 1964 analysis of

―Reminiscing,‖ critically hails the piece as jazz‘s ―most ambitious composition,‖ of its time, distinguishing the song from Ellington‘s prior long form compositions and the

Wagner (with the aid of the NAACP) was defeated in 1934, 1935, 1937, 1938 and again in 27 associated works of his peers by specifying its musical structure as both ―new, and revolutionary for jazz in 1935.‖ Citing its removal ―from conventional jazz form,‖

Bishop‘s musicological analysis of ―Reminiscing,‖ additionally emphasizes the aspects of

―Duke‘s lyricism‖ residing in the piece, revealing a narrative of mood and feeling that is deciphered through the music‘s innovative structure.14 Within Bishop‘s analysis, a discursive identity of Ellington‘s work is imagined and this chapter clarifies the stakes of this identity by isolating 'Reminiscing' as a critical juncture in the development of sonic resistance in jazz music. A juncture composed of stylistic innovation, Ellington's nascent public intellectual persona, and a Leftist political and cultural milieu that together, infused the composition with a political significance beyond Ellington's professed intentions.

Furthermore, this juncture reveals Ellington's effort to develop a musical grammar that could communicate African American life honestly and realistically. This effort provided a discourse for his open defiance of the boundaries placed upon jazz performance, and many other public articulations of African American culture for that matter, rendering his work

(and 'Reminiscing' specifically) as a political act that disturbed the hegemony of a constricting political and cultural environment steeped in the tradition of blackface minstrelsy.15 Channeled into the jazz format, the challenges that Ellington's work posed were an example of the radical expressions by creative intellectuals of the post-Harlem

1940. Singh, Black is a Country, 7. 14 A.J. Bishop, ―Reminiscing in Tempo‘: A Landmark in Jazz Composition,‖ 5. 15 In a 1941 interview, John Pittman declared Ellington‘s abhorrence of ―Uncle Tomism,‖ as part of Ellington‘s perspective that ―dissonance‖ is a part of the African- American and racialized ―way of life in America.‖ A way of life that contends with the discord of racism and the minstrelized American culture, but connects all Americans from the African-American contribution of ―Negro music.‖ John Pittman, ―The Duke Will Stay on Top!‖ in The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 148. 28 Renaissance, Depression Era society and Ellington‘s innovations provided specific creative examples and models for the anti-racist ideals of black public intellectuals. With his sporadic journalistic efforts complementing his musical piece a corroborative narrative formed through Ellington‘s total work, colliding openly with the minstrelized constraints of the swing era. Despite his eschewing of ostensible politics, I contend that Ellington produced political resonance with a schematic and representational musical language through ―Reminiscing‖ that became an integral example for the outward expressions of radicalism expressed by creative intellectuals in the post-Harlem, Depression-era society.

The Musical Identity of Black Public Intellectuals and the Popular Front

Navigating through the complex terrain of racial stereotype as well as the broader legalized limitations of Jim Crow was the primary focus of the newly public African-

American creative intellectual. Writers, artists, and an array of activists were among these intellectuals who utilized various strategies steeped in political ideology, social critique, and cultural practices such as jazz to develop a more public and autonomous African-

American visage by the 1930s. Emerging from the post-war, post-migratory period of the

1920s and still recuperating from the lingering effects of the Depression and the oppressive social realities of Jim Crow, the black intellectual surfaced to become a viable public voice for the newly urban African-American communities of the early 20th century.16

Harlem spatially operated as the geographical forum for the diverse ideological thought surfacing from the endeavors of black public intellectuals. Although far from being the only urban center for African-Americans, Harlem was situated as a symbolic

16 Anderson, Deep River, 210-214. 29 capital for the black intelligentsia by the 1920s, spawning and influencing a generation of black creative public thinkers that began their work of permeating the mainstream. With these intellectuals circulating over sites across the North and Mid-West, the Harlem identity of the 1920s transformed to the new post-Harlem intellectual of the 1930s— performing the ideological work of its generational predecessor yet functioning outside of the confines of the city and into the newly populated urban centers of the American landscape. Functioning within these spaces, this diverse intellectual identity often sparred over ideology—yet ultimately found corroboration in its response to the fervent racial exclusivity of American democratic nationalism with a radical activism sited in their works that challenged the encompassing, oppressive dynamics of a minstrelized racial environment.17 Expressed through artistic works and social activism, their radical response constructed a practical ideology that challenged a variety of racially defined oppressive legal, social, and political parameters that continued to work towards socially and economically relegating African-Americans towards a marginalized status.

Offering a useful definition of the public ―black activist intellectuals‖ of the post-

Harlem, post-Depression era, Nikhil Singh classifies the thinkers and their organizations

17 This diversity is evidenced by the competing strategies for black societal uplift expressed in the works and theories of an array of African-American public intellectuals. Alain Locke‘s vision of the ―New Negro‖ was a re-cultivation of the African-American character, creating a formalized, cosmopolitan identity that infused the ―folk‖ traditions of the culture but was ultimately valid in the eyes of the mainstream culture. Locke‘s New Negro concurred in a variety of ways with the overall agenda of W. E. B. DuBois. Coinciding with DuBois‘s ―talented- tenth‖ theory, Locke and DuBois developed a paternalistic outlook towards the redevelopment of the folk, embracing a romanticized vision of tradition in order to break away from the confines of the past and situate and redefine their plans for the New Negro. As a response to these cosmopolitan ideals, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, (and eventually, Duke Ellington) and others of the new guard of intellectuals redefined Locke‘s New Negro to placate their specific agenda in the realm of black societal uplift. See Anderson, Deep River, 60-111. 30 chiefly as social protagonists, working to repel ―the assertions of the universal moral, political, and ethical values of the nation-state in the breech created by the reproduction of historical racism.‖18 In other words, these intellectuals challenged the pejorative voicings of the mainstream, as these ―assertions‖ and ―values‖ continued to be cultivated from generations of systemic and cultural oppression—leaving black public intellectuals not only in a struggle for legal equalities but in a pervasive struggle against the minstrelized culture of the United States. A culture transfixed by racialized stereotype, thus powerfully casting the sum of African-American endeavors within a discourse of subjugation.

Singh‘s classification places this intellectual firmly in the Depression-era, with their creative and public works reaching a broad audience. Commenting on the expanded scope of the black public intellectual, Singh states that, ―by the 1930s a highly internationalist and leftist cohort of black intellectuals had begun to produce a sophisticated body of work analyzing racism and colonialism as a global history of Euro-American dominance.‖19

Singh‘s perspective assists in the categorization of the public thinkers as arbiters of

African-American political discourse piloting through ―the relentlessly ‗negative dialectic‖ of American racial discourse.20 Importantly, Singh declares the ideological and geographical diversity of scope concerning the black public intellectual, compensating for the influx of leftist rhetoric and activism taking place under the auspices or general influence of the New Deal.

Complicating this identity as potential arbiters of American racial and political discourse, black public intellectuals were also defined within the structural environment of

18 Singh, Black is a Country, 44. 19 Singh, Black is a Country, 48. 20 Singh, Black is a Country, 44. 31 the New Deal. Established by rigorous details of social and economic policy, the New

Deal fostered progressive programs of civic and racial equality. However, the bureaucracy presented by the governmental initiative also set in place the terms in which black public intellectuals could engage within the multifaceted federal program. In more recent studies, scholars of the era have sought to revisit how the New Deal produced a more specified political fabric for the culture of black public intellectuals in the swing era and how its democratic policies specifically reintroduced various forms of cultural, economic, and political controls towards African-American cultural products including jazz. Regarding the logistics of a New Deal enforced democratic stamp, Kenneth Bindas provides a detailed examination of the developing culture of creative black public intellectuals in the

Depression era, highlighting jazz musicians and the music created through the direct funding of the federal government. For example, with legislation approved by Congress in

1935, the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act budgeted approximately 4 billion dollars for relief efforts from the adverse social and economic effects of the Great Depression.

From this law came the Works Progress Administration (WPA), an act promising ―that the government would not ‗refuse responsibility for providing jobs to those whom private industry does not hire.‖21 In August of 1935, the WPA announced the creation of the FAP

(Federal Art Project) an effort that spawned a variety of artistic employment programs such as the FTP (Fed Theater Project), FMP (Federal Music Project), and FWP (Fed Writers‘

Project).22 Concerning the FMP, Bindas concluded that the project, ―provide(d) an excellent example of the cultural battlefield that was Great Depression-era America.‖

21 Kenneth Bindas, All of this Music Belongs to Us (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1995), ix-x. 22 Bindas, All of this Music Belongs to Us, ix-7. 32 Bindas further added that, ―in the larger context, the FMP‘s problems and means of addressing the fundamental questions of its existence mirror the cultural tensions concerning popular, vernacular culture in relation to its antithetical relationship with the traditional, cultivated culture.‖23 Bindas‘s work presents a culture of swing in which black public intellectuals functioned—a culture that is part of a ―new vernacular music‖ that

―symbolize(d) the popular,‖ but also one that was created in large part from the legislative and economic policies of the New Deal.24 Bindas concludes that swing, ―was providing employment to many musicians and reviving a nearly dead recording industry‖ and places an interesting context on the ―people‘s music,‖ whereas swing transmits the policies of the

New Deal, reaching homes and communities through the aid of the government in an effort to revitalize a nation traumatized by the Great Depression.25

Bindas further posits that African-Americans ―were new to the Democratic umbrella,‖ exposing the ―FMP‘s difficulty with the ideals of the democratic, pluralistic vision promoted by the New Deal,‖ particularly in, ―its employment of African-American musicians.‖26 Regardless, Bindas notes that the political shift in the mid 1930s, marked an augmented number of African-American voters towards the Democratic Party where, ―as late as 1932, 70 percent of the African-American vote had gone to the Republican Party.‖27

However, stemming from the inefficiencies of the National Industrial Recovery Act,‖ (also

―deemed the ―Negro Removal Act‖ by the black press) a point was suggested that FDR‘s racial sympathies expressed in the legislation of the New Deal did not translate to direct

23 Bindas, All of this Music Belongs to Us, xiv. 24 Bindas, All of this Music Belongs to Us, 7. 25 Bindas, All of this Music Belongs to Us, 15. 26 Bindas, All of this Music Belongs to Us, vii, 71. 27 Bindas, All of this Music Belongs to Us, 72. 33 change in the American racial landscape.28 Bindas sees a parallel between the inaction of the federal government towards African-Americans and the difficulties encountered by black swing musicians to achieve fame in mainstream America. While white artists such as

Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, and Tommy Dorsey ―achieved great popularity using arrangements by African Americans‖ and ―deemphasized the blackness of jazz‖ whereas black ―originators like Duke Ellington and Count Basie…earned about half as much money as their white counterparts.‖29 Bindas concludes, suggesting that the lack of political and economic agency experienced by African-Americans in the New Deal translated towards a lack of agency in the production of culture itself, stating, ―to its credit, swing did encourage racial integration and helped introduced many great black musicians to the American people, but the music, while rooted in black jazz, remained in the cultural control of whites.‖30 The work of Bindas remains crucial to the evolving template of New

Jazz Studies, particularly in its efforts to bring African-Americans into focus as ideological products of the New Deal Era, symbolizing both its ideals and failures in the umbrella politics of the Popular Front. Indicating the ways in which swing culture was shaped by the regulatory politics of the New Deal, Bindas hints at the developing identity of minstrelsy, expanding past blackface caricature towards a systematic devaluing of black art and culture. And as Bindas‘s analysis recognizes the important political shifts and results of New Deal inspired political alterations, and specifically, those alterations upon the cultural landscaping of African-American identity, his work inevitably underscores the

28 Bindas also states, ―discriminatory practices occurred in other New deal agencies, such as the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), Tennessee valley Authority (TVA), Farm Credit Administration, and Resettlement Administration.‖ Bindas, All of this Music Belongs to Us, 73. 29 Bindas, All of this Music Belongs to Us, 76. 34 individualized efforts of black public intellectuals that were set forth to counter the constraints presented by segregation and the ubiquitous minstrelized controls of post-

Depression America.

Within the structural environment presented by the New Deal, the post-Harlem, public intellectual identity worked to re-define black cultural forms on African-American terms, combating the stridently anti-intellectual and vigorously primitive stamp of identity expressed directly in the form of minstrelsy, which functioned both as an artistic practice and a broader system of racialized thought.31 Represented artistically as well as politically, from the newly appointed members in Roosevelt‘s ―Black Cabinet‖ who pushed the

President for social and economic reforms, to the diversity of leftist political ideologies expressed in New Deal liberalism, radical Marxism, and Garvey-ite nationalism, this newly public, creatively intellectual, post-Harlem thinker emerged to express the broad scope of

African-American identity during the 1930s.32 This intellectual also absorbed the artistic content of the Harlem Renaissance, but mostly worked to reorganize and redefine the traditions planted from the 1920s—serving as a response to the minstrelized social climate and its domineering effects on African-American cultural, political, and creative expression. As indicative of the Popular Front era, the production of art often served both a cultural and political purpose. And in the field of jazz the works of Duke Ellington—a prototypical post-Harlem intellectual—materialized to serve as an effective example of this emergent tradition and the further development of a counter-minstrel narrative.

30 Bindas, All of this Music Belongs to Us, 76. 31 Anderson, Deep River, 234. 32 Erenberg, Swingin‟ the Dream, 114-132. 35 Ellington and the Minstrel Milieu of the 1930s

For Ellington, his 1935 piece symbolized a new commitment towards his artistry.

Deviating from his previous musical works as well as the structural limitations common to the Tin Pan Alley produced 78-rpm record, ―Reminiscing‖ pointed towards a more personalized artistic focus that clarified his newfound approach to composition and jazz improvisation.33 A press clipping on the piece clarified its musical intentions, noting that the solos were written specifically to coincide with the musical themes of the piece.

According to jazz historian Kenneth Vail:

It is longer than the usual Ellington opus, occupying over twelve minutes in actual playing time. It is the first time in Ellington history that one of his selections was completely orchestrated before playing. Duke was extremely anxious that the selection be played by his famous orchestra as written. No solo ―ad libs‖ were attempted during the recording of ―Reminiscing.‖34

Janna Tull Steed further elaborated on the sonic complexities of the piece in her analysis of the spirituality of Ellington‘s works. Steed states that the piece is ―characterized by complex harmonic structures and an interweaving of asymmetrical melodic motifs.‖35

Steed however, also noted that Ellington‘s manager, Irving Mills, regretted the release of the work, classifying it as, ―the beginning of an unfortunate departure from Ellington‘s style,‖ that indicated a detrimental change in musical focus the commercially viable icon.36

Concerned that Ellington was no longer writing for his audience ―at the tables of the Cotton

Club,‖ ―Reminiscing‘s‖ intricate musicality challenged the conceptions held by both the

33 Hasse also cites how a slight commercial slump in the sales of jazz provided this artistic window for Ellington. Hasse states, ―In some ways, this dip gave Ellington the composer even freer rein to experiment.‖ Hasse, Beyond Category, 203. 34 Ken Vail, Duke‟s Diary. Part One: The Life of Duke Ellington 1927-1950, (Cambridge: Vail Publishing, 1999), 116. 35 Janna Tull Steed, Duke Ellington: A Spiritual Biography, (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1999), 68. 36 audience and music industry over the sound, style, and function of swing jazz.

Intrinsically, the piece held deeper resonance outside of Mills‘ thwarted commercial aspirations, sonically outlining a distinctly counter-minstrel narrative in the midst of an artistic landscape still subjugated by the lasting effects of the minstrel show.37 Before detailing these sonic features, this chapter will analyze the oppressive cultural setting that led to Ellington‘s counter-minstrel narrative. Similar to a number of noteworthy black artists of the period, Ellington‘s own connection to minstrel stereotyping remained complicated throughout the post-Depression era. For example, in 1942 Ellington willfully engaged in a minstrel setting, supplying the music to the film version of ―Uncle Tom‘s

Cabin,‖ staring Charles Grapwin, a white vaudevillian actor donning blackface for the starring role.38 However, Ellington had earlier been praised by the Pittsburgh Courier for being one of the ―sepia theatrical folks,‖ who, ―have not disgraced their race by clowning and ‗uncle toming.‖39 The complexity of Ellington‘s minstrel setting is characterized by this dual role with the artist serving as both a functional abettor and stern opponent of minstrelsy. Straddling these oppositional lines neither side is resolved. Unable to fully circumvent these common racialized depictions, Ellington reliably navigated a troubled course within these surroundings by maintaining an ability to project positive racial imagery in minstrelsy‘s shadow.

36 Steed, Duke Ellington, 68. 37 Hasse outlines Ellington‘s growing distaste for these minstrelized trappings, identifying the racist parameters which affected his work. Hasse states, ―despite his unmatched genius, (Ellington) saw many other bands, especially white ones, zoom past him in popularity and recompense. No wonder he once said, ‗Jazz is music; swing is business.‖ Hasse, Beyond Category, 203. 38 Edwin Schallert, ―Seventh Column‘ Set; Metro Buys Dog Story,‖ Los Angeles Times, April 30, 1942, a10. 37 Providing a context for the historical circumstances of this duality, Henry Louis

Gates Jr. concerns his analysis with the ―artificially formed,‖ tropes of blackness, similar to

Ellington‘s example, who ―bear an antithetical relation to one another,‖ as both New

Negroes and minstrelized figures.40 Struggling with the pervasive burden of racial stereotype, Gates traces the efforts of black public intellectuals to ―rewrite the received text of themselves,‖ in order to ―erase their received racist image in the Western imagination,‖ even citing Ellington as an underappreciated example of the New Negro intelligentsia whose creative works, ―defined a new era in the history of Western music.‖41 Moreso,

Gates‘ analysis presents the idea of why Ellington among others ―came to be the trope‖ of a reconstructed black image, with the musician ―signing‖ through name and artistry a projected antithesis of minstrel imagery. However, Gates‘s research, which draws upon a

―collection of ten thousand racist visual images of blacks between 1800 and 1940,‖ offers a perspective into my classification of minstrelized settings and surroundings as the constant visual and rhetorical backdrop of racist imagery stains the field of black cultural production.42 Compensating effectively for its inevitable dissemination from a purely stage routine to film and other media, minstrelsy undoubtedly maintained its foundation as a coded system of racialized oppression in the 1930s, exercised through racial lampoon, segregated performances, and the promotion of white artistic imitations of black cultural

39 Earl Morris, ―Grandtown Editor Advises ‗Skip It…and Fo‘get it!‖ The Pittsburgh Courier, March 6, 1937, 19. 40 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black," Representations (Fall, 1988): 130. 41 Gates, Jr., "The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black," 148. 42 Gates, Jr., "The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black," 137.

38 forms. And although no longer exclusively relegated to the overt performance of blackface caricature, the milieu of minstrelsy functioned ubiquitously as a fixed racialized anchor in the 1930s—producing a dominant characterization of African-Americans based upon pejorative stereotype and experienced by blacks throughout the whole of mainstream society.43

Minstrelsy, however, also functioned adjacently to these traditional stereotypical distinctions of black and white, particularly as African-American entertainers themselves increasingly seized upon minstrel routines to perform before a mainstream audience. In her examination of Virgil Thomson‘s 1934 opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, a Broadway show that ―combined (the) novelty of (an) African-American cast and Gertrude stein‘s name,‖

Lisa Barg examines how minstrelsy existed discursively within the swing cultures of New

Deal society.44 Barg‘s analysis documents the circulating language of racial ideology and discloses how the promotion of ―blackness‖ within art produced consonant ideas to the discourse concerning racial difference. Citing Carl Van Vechten as ―one of the opera‘s most enthusiastic promoters,‖ Barg quotes Van Vechten, who states that African-American singers ―alone possess the dignity and the poise, the lack of self-consciousness that proper interpretation of the opera demands.‖45 Barg also cites Van Vechten‘s generalized compliments towards African-Americans, stating that, ―they have the rich, resonant voices

43 As the dominant model for American expressive art, a basis for societal construction, and a method for measuring cultural identity, minstrelsy is based upon a fabricated sense of cultural, and of course, racial fascination. Adding to this discussion, Eric Lott argues that, ―blackness,‖ as constructed through minstrelsy, ―is not innate but produced, a cultural construction.‖ Lott, Love and Theft, 36. 44 Lisa Barg, ―Black Voices/White Sounds: Race and Representation in Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts‖ American Music, Vol. 18, No. 2, (Summer, 2000), 122. 45 Barg, Black Voices/White Sounds, 123. 39 essential to the singing of my music and the clear enunciation required to deliver

Gertrude‘s text.‖46 Barg‘s analysis points towards minstrelsy‘s persistent nature, in spite of the liberal discourse designed to promote the cultural and intellectual value of black art.

Exemplified through Van Vechten‘s promotion of artistic virtue that is authenticated solely through racial defined means, Barg singles out the language that transmitted a sense of racial totalization in liberal circles that adversely rendered the anti-racist intentionalities of progressive discourse moot within the discursive shadow of minstrelsy. Barg sums up her perspective, stating that the casting of, ―African-Americans as figures of sublime premodern essence,‖ worked to ―fix black subjects as fetishized objects of inquiry.‖47 In essence, minstrelsy expands past its historically antagonistic and seemingly transparent black and white binary. With Barg‘s analysis, we see how the minstrel setting expands past its historically antagonistic and seemingly transparent black and white binary. As black cultural products became vogue or in some cases ―dignified‖ in the cultural eye of the mainstream, the artistic value is predicated on a basis of racialization thus compromising the dialogue and practice in which the cultural products could be transmitted and discerned.

The minstrel milieu of the 1930s is further uncovered in Jeff Magee‘s study of

Fletcher Henderson. In Magee‘s analysis, minstrelsy is discussed indirectly through an analysis that recognizes the ensuing artistic and social power of select black musicians as a result of the ―paradigm shift in the record industry,‖ that occurred by 1920 that ―marked the beginning, when music industry executives began to realize that record sales had become a

46 Barg, Black Voices/White Sounds, 123. 47 Barg, Black Voices/White Sounds, 152. 40 better measure of success and popularity than sheet music sales.‖48 Henderson, who had chart hits with both ―race records‖ and ―general records ―—the industry‘s term for records that sold well amongst the white mainstream—―like his contemporary Edward Kennedy

―Duke‖ Ellington, two years his junior,‖ complicate the presumed boundaries of the minstrel milieu as both artists attempted to straddle these commercial lines, facing the

―advantages and setbacks in (their) effort(s) to parlay a cultivated upbringing into a musical career.‖49 Through an analysis that provides an example of the developing social and artistic power of black creative intellectuals a deeper understanding of minstrelsy unfolds as artists such as Henderson and Ellington negotiate minstrelsy‘s terms in an attempt to straddle black and white commercial lines.

Positioning this negotiation in Lockian fashion, Magee envisions Henderson (and thus, Ellington) as the ―New Negro from the Old South,‖ to symbolize, in terms similar to

Gates an innate representation of the aspirations and talents of the New Negro. While inverting racist stereotype and classification through a cultivated artistic presence, this

―New Negro‖ negotiates the terms of minstrelsy, acknowledging the centrality of these stereotypes in signifying the primitive appeal of jazz and the minstrelized virtues and practices of the ―old South.‖50 Magee funnels a vision of swing culture through

Henderson‘s example, encapsulating the nascent agency of black jazz composers in the era through a realization of their progressive contributions while highlighting their negotiation of that agency within the constraints of minstrelsy.

Magee‘s singular analysis of the swing movement further uncovers the minstrel

48 Jeff Magee, The Uncrowned King of Swing: Fletcher Henderson and Big Band Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 7. 49 Magee, The Uncrowned King of Swing, 7, 26. 41 milieu as African-American musicians such as Henderson traversed through ―the increasing power of the Paul Whiteman paradigm, which cannot be dismissed as merely a transient commercial alternative.‖51 Whiteman, the icon of ―symphonic jazz,‖ a contradictory style of traditional black musical practice and performance was the art form‘s most popular musician, eschewing improvisational technique in his orchestral compositions in favor of a formalized classical musical approach. Magee‘s analysis of Henderson is largely a recognition of his compromise of the Whiteman paradigm, showcasing an ability to ultimately ―reflect DuBois‘s ‗unreconciled strivings‖ through ―a deliberate strategy,‖ and

―a deft balancing act‖ between mainstream tastes, the New Negro agenda, that ―called for a refinement and stylization of those folkways,‖ and the expression of the improvised folk elements indicative of the African-American jazz tradition.52 Indeed, Magee cites

Henderson‘s ―double consciousness‖ as an employment of the ―unique negotiation‖ necessary to produce progressive music through these discordant elements found within the

Whiteman paradigm of jazz.53 As Paul Whiteman‘s musical popularity briefly ―constituted not just the wave of the future of jazz but the only kind of jazz there was,‖ Magee‘s work gives insight into the racialized confines indicative of swing culture, but importantly, presents an example of how the minstrel milieu was defined by the borders and constraints presented by mainstream tastes.54

Ellington‘s minstrel milieu is defined by these examples and his efforts to reorganize popular swing into a concertized bastion of musical art. As his pieces developed

50 Magee, The Uncrowned King of Swing, 12. 51 Magee, The Uncrowned King of Swing, 97. 52 Magee, The Uncrowned King of Swing, 98-99. 53 Magee, The Uncrowned King of Swing, 99. 54 Magee, The Uncrowned King of Swing, 97. 42 on both ideological and sonic planes—developing narrative themes, historical lineage, hybridization, and recalculating rhythm—the presence of his minstrel milieu tangentially expanded in a progressive unison.55 From the gradual exposure of African-Americans in the mainstream, the overt practice of blackface minstrelsy waned as the demand for authentic and replicated versions of African-American art slowly gained in popularity.

However, its spectral legacy worked to contaminate the production, perception, and discernment of African-American themed art in the period. And alongside the oppressive and distinctly racialized legalities of Jim Crow segregation, the milieu of minstrelsy maintained its power by surrounding the practice of African-American and black-oriented art, producing a racialized stamp that defined the works, its practice, and discernment amongst the American public.56

Jungle Music and the Minstrel Milieu

Setting the stage for the unabashed radicalism of Ellington‘s 1935 extended piece were his experiments in the realm of ―jungle music,‖ with popular songs such as ―East St.

Louis Toodle-O,‖ (1926) ―Skeedely-Un-Dum,‖ (1927) and his enormous hit, ―Black and

Tan Fantasy‖ (1927).57 Showcasing his new musical approach, Ellington‘s 1931 piece,

―Echoes of the Jungle,‖ became a popular standard that typified the thematic and artistic

55 ―It was very evident that here was one colored composer who realized the cramping forces of exploitation which handicap not only him and his colleagues, but the Negro masses as well. That is why their expression is filled with protest. He is also fully conscious that there are imitators and chiselers, always ready to capitalize on specious products purporting to ‗represent‘ the Negro.‖ Edward Morrow, ―Duke Ellington on Gershwin‘s ‗Porgy,‖ New Theatre, December 1935, 6. 56 Craig Werner also joins the debate, noting the ―minstrel dilutions of swing‖ that contributed to the diminished creativity and racialized parameters placed upon the musical field. Craig Werner, A Change is Gonna Come (New York: Plume, 1999), 132-136. 43 content indicative of his elaborate jungle style. The song was constructed over four distinct musical themes, driving along the familiar swing-based up-tempo rhythmic stomp often played in unison in the piece by the bass, piano, and percussion, incorporating an orchestral approach to the blues, the use of the plunger mute became jungle‘s trademark sonic gimmick, producing a variety of sounds that imitated human voices ranging from an aggressive ―growl‖ to a ―wah-wah‖ sound that mimicked both joy and sadness.

Instructing the Brunswick label to market Ellington‘s recordings under the pseudonym, ―the Jungle Band,‖ Ellington‘s manager Irving mills along with Ellington capitalized on the public‘s appetite for this new brand of emotive, blues derived swing.58

The jungle period represented the initial stages of Ellington‘s developing authority as a composer and band leader. Gunther Schuller comments that the period represented a

―musical partnership, truly unprecedented in the history of Western music, developed in which a major composer forged a musical style and concept which, though totally original and individual, nevertheless consistently incorporated and integrated the no less original musical ideas of his players.‖59 Reliably, Schuller documents Ellington‘s developing promise as a composer but notes his lingering reliance on the individual improvisations of soloists that marked the insouciant, swinging style of his jungle period. And in short, jungle music represented Ellington‘s most artistically daring yet contextually confining music to date. With tunes such as ―Jungle Nights in Dixie,‖ Ellington‘s music clearly demarcated his persistent space within the minstrel milieu a racially charged pieces such as

57 Hasse, Beyond Category, 98-110. 58 A. H. Lawrence, Duke Ellington and His World: A Biography (New York: Rutledge, 2001), 117. 59 A. H. Lawrence, Duke Ellington and His World: A Biography (New York: Rutledge, 2001), 117. 44 ―Jim Dandy,‖ were later described by John Franceschina as ―Ellington‘s paean to the strutting dandy archetype.‖60 In accordance with the racist social parameters presented in the all-white Cotton Club where Ellington popularized his new sound, the jungle genre conferred upon the artist an array of stylistic, musical, and social limitations based upon the form‘s dominant reliance on stereotypes and rhythmic clichés in its overall production—all of which were musical sensibilities that Ellington hoped to escape.61

The proscribed confines presented in his jungle style matched the stifling minstrelized climate found in the spatial boundaries of the Cotton Club. According to

Martin Williams‘ critical analysis of Ellington‘s music, Williams posits that Ellington approached jungle music with ―his own kind of urbane but optimistic irony,‖ using

―preposterous titles like ‗Jungle Nights in Harlem‘ for the benefit of the ‗slumming‘ white crowds at the club,‖ while simultaneously ―expanding the sonorities, the color, the orchestrational resources of his ensemble and creating a memorable and durable music.‖62

Ironically, the musical sensibilities in jungle style nascently provided a portal towards a progressive form of jazz artistry as its emphasis to construct a discernable sonic narrative indicated its developing role as a visual-based form of music. In essence, the perceived

(and imagined) theatricality of the African and early African-American landscaped experienced through the process of visualization became synonymous components in the

60 John Franceschina, Duke Ellington‟s Music for the Theatre (Jefferson: McFarrland & Company, Inc., 2001), 13. 61 Franceschina describes the ―singularity of Ellington‘s ‗jungle‘ style‖ as ―marked‖ indicating the consistency of the musical form yet also indicating his persistent need for change, according to his quotes indicating the ―stagnant‖ and ―monotonous‖ nature of his own music. Franceschina, Duke Ellington‟s Music for the Theatre, 17-20. 62 Martin Williams, ―Form Beyond Form,‖ in The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 404.

45 overall discernment of the art form. And the visual theatricality became the primary motivation behind the music, as well as the main reason for its widespread popularity amongst its audience, particularly in Harlem‘s exclusively white Cotton Club.63 Favoring the exotic setting of an ―Africanized‖ jungle over the traditional plantation-style landscape, jungle music satiated the primitivist perception of jazz as an animalistic, instinctive activity creatively bound to the racial essentialism inherent of minstrelsy. Furthermore, the sound was designed to illustrate this visual context and imagined memory of traditional blackness—a sensibility stemming from a fractured depiction of African traditional forms resulting from the practice of minstrelsy.

The visual created from the jungle style was so successful that it also found a home in movies and plays as the music was used to literally paint a picture of the perceived environment of the jungles of Africa and voodoo rituals of the Diaspora. With King Kong and Tarzan popularizing the exotic myth of the jungle to mainstream America, Tin Pan

Alley also turned out a variety of jungle songs including 1926‘s ―Babes in the Jungle‖ and

1929s ―The Jungle Rhythm.‖ In the 1933 film adaptation of Eugene O‘Neil‘s The Emperor

Jones, the discursive and physical setting is established in terms similar to the content expressed in jungle style as the opening shots, which juxtapose a black, Southern Baptist church with an African dance ritual, represent a continuum theory of primitivism in black culture as the ―exotic‖ and ―savage‖ elements of the rituals blend in the lens of the mainstream audience. Central to the narrative of the story is the drumming heard throughout most of the film that supplies a sonic representation of the land and culture,

63 Williams continues, stating, ―some of the sketches and production numbers in the Cotton Club shows were lurid affairs, with ‗jungle‘ nonsense, or sheiks kidnapping fair 46 sonically identifying the exotic allure and mysterious danger of natives who eventually lead to Emperor Jones‘s madness. The sound of the drum faintly originates from a distant hilltop and becomes more persistent and louder as the play‘s narrative reaches its climax, providing a dialogue for the silent characters, from the apparitions who haunt Emperor

Jones to those who eventually drive him to madness. The sound of the drums also serve as a counterpoint for the internal dialogue of Emperor Jones—representing his overwhelming fear and loss of sanity with a pulsating beat of a tom-tom. The film provides an adaptive example of the communicative aspect of drumming that provides a discernable narrative through a repetitious, coded, and traditional musical language reminiscent of the cultural legacy of African drumming.64

Ultimately, jungle music provided a discursive context for the minstrel milieu, delving in to the popular, hedonistic, and exotic allure or nighttime jazz experienced in

―Jungle Alley‖ near 133rd Street in Harlem. Commenting on the Cotton Club‘s primitive appeal, Langston Hughes was quoted as saying that, ―strangers were given the best ringside tables to sit and stare at the Negro, like amusing animals in a zoo.‖65 Gaining popularity amongst its whites-only audience a variety of black performers such as Josephine Baker and Louis Armstrong adopted the sound and visual aesthetic, donning costumes that symbolized the exotic appeal of the jungle style. Gail Bederman‘s thesis provides a noteworthy glimpse into this popular appeal. As Bederman theorizes, the popular vision of the American male at the turn of the 20th century was in its rejection of the Victorian ethics

maidens, etc., and the music occasionally had to be bizarre and always immediate in its effect.‖ Williams, Form Beyond Form,‖ 404. 64 The Emperor Jones, directed by Dudley Murphy, 76 minutes, Criterion Collection, 2006, DVD. 47 of manliness and its overall promotion of the ―rough working class masculinity‖ of the virile, physical, and powerful man. Jack Johnson, a black boxing champion is located by

Bederman as an embodiment of these traits but due to his race is the literal antithesis of the equation. As Bederman testifies, the revision of manhood at the turn of the 20th century was a response to the impact of modernity—from urbanization, mass (im)migration, and post–reconstruction—and the revision efforts on the part of middle and upper class men was an attempt to control the tumultuous, nascent modern American environment. As the

American civilization formed in accordance with this cult of masculinity, it constructed modes of dominance, and race and gender were classified in order to maintain these privileges. Presumably, Bederman‘s thesis also accounts for the fear amongst naturalist theorists that humans were inherently passive victims of ―natural‖ forces and social environments. By adopting the primitive, Bederman argues that men, and white men in particular, ―upheld‖ society and could justify their violent, racist and sexist actions under the pretext of maintaining the integrity and prosperity of the American civilization.66

Accompanying Ellington‘s music was the floorshow of scantily clad black women, equipped with feathery headdresses and bikini-styled animal print outfits. Symbolic of the stereotyped depiction of the exotic Mulatto, these dancers performed syncopated routines with steps partially reminiscent of the Charleston (a dance popularized by whites who were imitating African-American routines) and that of an African ceremonial motif, due to its

―down to earth,‖ crouching style. The dancers were routinely positioned in front of

65 Ken Burns and Geoffrey C. Ward, Jazz; A History of America‟s Music, (New York: Knopf, 2000), 149-151. 66 See Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Urbana: University Of Chicago Press, 1996), 9- 21. 48 Ellington‘s stage providing an alternative visual component to the music and clearly representing the music‘s implied sexuality and racialized presentation. Observing the spectacle and illustrating his growing disdain for his own creation, Ellington noted that,

―that part was degrading and humiliating to both Negroes and whites.‖67 With full-length mirrors underneath them, the dancers were a depiction of outlandish fantasy, but were in place as a spectacle to exoticize the music and provide an ambiguous representation of

African and African-derived music and culture for a white audience.

Often starting from a heavy and monotonous bass drum pattern, the standard rhythms of the jungle sound were perceived as both the familiar voice and face of African and Africanized music.68 As the rhythmic pattern would inevitably become poly-rhythmic, the seemingly mysterious and primal music, as well as its practitioners came to life in the night clubs of America.69 The musical depiction of the African environment was further punctuated by the brass section that mimicked the various sounds of the jungle through the squeals of muted horns as an array of female dancers completed the audience‘s journey towards the far reaching corners of the African safari from the comforts of their floor seating. Mimi Clar clarifies the identifiable sound of jungle music, stating that, ―the well known ‗jungle style‘ arising in the late twenties developed with the beat of the rhythm and plaintive wail of the reeds, as well as with the muted growls, dirty tones, and wah-wah lines of the brass.‖70 The artistic result was one of significance as Ellington established a progressive approach to jazz through its incorporation of a visual medium to provide a

67 Burns and Ward, Jazz, 151. 68 Burns and Ward, Jazz, 145-151. 69 Burns and Ward, Jazz, 151. 70 Mimi Clar, ―The Style of Duke Ellington,‖ The Jazz Review 2, no. 3, (April 1959): 7. 49 discursive basis for non-lyrical music to follow. Therefore, the style, regardless of its racialized trappings, marked an intellectual breakthrough outlining the theoretical potential of jazz, directly centering abstract musical expression towards tangible pathways for messages to be shared.

With its development of visual themes for the purpose of accessible narrativity, jungle music, although mired in minstrel stereotype represents the initial stages of

Ellington‘s progressive musical approach and the compositional foundations of what would become his counter-minstrel technique displayed in ―Reminiscing.‖ Recognizing the multifaceted sonic possibilities of the muted horn to represent the complexities of human voice and emotion, the stage marked Ellington‘s emergent interest in emphasizing harmony as the primary sonic fixture in jazz song. This is not to suggest that Ellington during his

―Reminiscing‖ stage eschewed rhythm—he did not, however, it is appropriate to posit that

Ellington‘s intellectual response to the musical, contextual, and ultimately social trappings of minstrelsy presented in jungle and swing music is signaled through his eventual incorporation of a harmonic induced rhythm that served as the clarifying statement of his progressive musical and social individuality.

In 1931, the Pittsburgh Courier evaluated Ellington‘s music and noted the following concerning his new template of rhythm:

Delightful and tricky rhythmic effects are never introduced for sheer sensational purposes, rather they are developed and combined with others as a logical part and parcel of a whole work.71

Throughout the 1930s, Ellington is still deeply entrenched in the overall structure of traditional African-American based rhythm. His time signatures, his emphasis on swing

71 R. D. Darrell, ―Black Beauty,‖ disques, June 1932, 156. 50 beats, and his call and response rhythmic interplay between instruments, are all indicative characteristics of a traditional, African-American derived basis of rhythm. However, what comes to distinguish ―Reminiscing‖ from his earlier jungle period is the development of a progressive musical language, emphasized primarily by the brass and reed sections that transferred rhythmic responsibilities from the drum to the horn. By the time of

―Reminiscing,‖ Ellington‘s approach had become poly-rhythmic; however, his newly adopted approach produces these alternative beat patterns through typically non-rhythmic instrumentation. The Pittsburgh Courier concluded that, ―there is a high degree of subtlety in treating the inexorable fundamental dance beat,‖ stating that, ―it is never disguised, indeed often stressed, but it is combined with the flowing bass so adroitly that it provides the sturdy substructure on which Ellington rears his luxuriant structure of moving parts, forgotten except in that it provides the measure by which to appreciate the boldly declamatory freedom of the upper voices.‖72 The ―luxuriant structure‖ of Ellington‘s sound characterizes the musical pursuit. A musical pursuit that ideologically coincides with the agenda of black public intellectuals of the era such as Alain Locke, who sought to present the ideal of cultural, societal, and therefore political equality in a musical language that combats the trappings of an oppressive culture.73 With his new artistic mission in mind,

Ellington summed up his progressive approach, stating ―I have already said that it is my firm belief that what is still known as ‗jazz‘ is going to play a considerable part in the serious music of the future. I am proud of that part my race is playing in the artistic life of the world.‖74

72 Darrell, ―Black Beauty,‖ 156. 73 Duke Ellington, ―The Duke Steps Out,‖ Rhythm, March 1931, 22. 74 Ellington, ―The Duke Steps Out,‖ 22. 51

An Alternative Musical Paradigm

Transitioning from his jungle style, Ellington faced increased competition from his musical peers along with a number of obstacles along the way. Gunther Schuller summarizes the pressures presented to Ellington by 1935:

In point of fact things were suddenly not going well for Ellington. Was it the instability of the orchestras personnel and the constant rumors of more leave- takings? Was it the growing nagging criticism by some of the jazz writers? Was it the inroads made by ‗swing music,‘ by bands like Goodman and Dorsey, the growing profusion of commercial dance bands? Was it the consistent inability of his potentially popular successes—Sophisticated Lady, Solitude, In a Sentimental Mood—to break through the Tin Pan Alley machinery? Was it the relentless pressures and frustrations inherent in a white-controlled market? Or was it his mother‘s illness and her imminent death?75

The composition of Ellington‘s 1935 extended piece gave the artist ample time to reflect the gamut of his emotions towards his mother, but importantly, the piece signified his growing disdain for the creative and ultimately racialized confines placed upon him by an array of critics and his white audience. In a recent essay documenting Ellington‘s post-

Harlem perspective, Marc Tucker quotes Nathan Huggins‘s claim that Ellington became a social crusader through his music because of these boundaries, taking up the mission, ―to discover and define his culture and his contribution to what had been thought a white civilization.‖76 Marking a clear departure from both his upbeat swing catalogue and the

―jungle‖ sensibilities of his previous popular works that made him a mainstay at the Cotton

Club (and solidified his band as one of the top working groups of the swing era) 1935s

―Reminiscing‖ helped situate Ellington into an artistic context and social standing

75 Schuller, The Swing Era, 70. 52 previously vacant to the majority of mainstream friendly African-American performers.77

Coming into 1935, the jazz scene segued from the golden age of carefree jazz marked by ―hot players‖ and Dixieland soloists like King Oliver and Geary ―Bunk‖

Johnson who popularized a modernized style of jazz from its ragtime and vaudevillian roots. The scene by 1935 fully entered the swing era, a term initially popularized by

Ellington‘s compositions, and a genre of music categorically defined by its 4/4 time signature and its accented emphasis on the 2nd and 4th beats of the measure, which stylistically placed the music into a separate sonic context from the previous era‘s emphasis on the 1st and 3rd beats, typically associated with the waltz and other formally associated dance music. The large uniform swing bands were popular in great part due to their broad musical and dance oriented accessibility and provided the soundtrack for a generation of

American‘s who were inexorably defined by the lasting political, social, and economic effects of the Depression, but who found solace in the music and were eager to experience the spirited nightlife still offered in cities such as Harlem, Chicago and other havens of swing jazz.

The bands of Don Redman, Count Basie, Fletcher Henderson, and Duke Ellington laid the foundations for swing as the bands of Chick Webb and white artists such as Paul

Whiteman saw great success by 1935. Benny Goodman, a white classically trained

76 Marc Tucker, ―The Renaissance Education of Duke Ellington,‖ in Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. (Knoxville: The University Tennessee Press, 1990), 112. 77 Floyd Snelson, ―Story of Duke Ellington‘s Rise to Kingship of Jazz,‖ Pittsburgh Courier, December 19th, 1931. Ellington‘s gig at the Cotton Club remained steady for over 3 years until 1931 as the artist embarked on a number of cross country tours. John Hasse speculates that, ―why he left the Cotton Club is not clear. It is possible that Ellington‘s popularity at the Cotton Club had begun to decline, but it seems more likely that Mills 53 clarinetist was arguably jazz‘s most popular artist as his music became a household and radio favorite amongst young, white college students and casual music fans. In his analysis of Ellington‘s place in the scene, Paul Allen Anderson states, ―Ellington represented a distinctive alternative to Goodman‘s and Basie‘s senses of band leadership and (John)

Hammond‘s conception of the Swing Era,‖ continuing that, ―unlike Goodman, Ellington enjoyed a reputation as jazz music‘s preeminent composer.‖ Anderson also states that,

―unlike Basie, Ellington often wrote pieces that were not so much blues-laced frames for improvisation and ‗riffing‘ as idiosyncratic compositions indelibly associated with the specific musical personalities in his band.‖78 Individual, smaller band leaders such as

Louis ―Satchmo‖ Armstrong, and popular jazz vocalists such as Billie Holliday also contributed an alternative musical context to the scene, often relying less on dance oriented swing and focusing on virtuoso individualized instrumentation and performance—a style laden with blues oriented textures and the early swing principles commonly associated with early New Orleans based jazz. In some regards, Armstrong, also known as ―Pops‖ for his amiable and paternalistic relationship both musically and socially with younger musicians was an influence and musical antecedent to Ellington‘s jungle style as well as an unavoidable rival to Ellington‘s claim of jazz‘s top African-American icon. However, as

Ellington‘s musical style began to stray from the purely jungle sensibilities that initially defined him, musicians and critics began to demarcate a clear line between Ellington‘s sound and that of the majority of his contemporaries, including Armstrong. In a 1934 review written by British composer and critic Constant Lambert, Lambert speculates on

(Irving, Ellington‘s manager), exploiting Ellington‘s growing fame, found that he and Ellington could make more money by touring the country.‖ Hasse, Beyond Category, 144. 78 Anderson , Deep River, 259. 54 this difference and marks the emergent intellectual artistry of Ellington‘s compositions as the primary signifier between Ellington and his musical peers.

An artist like Louis Armstrong, who is one of the most remarkable virtuosi of the present day, enthralls us at a first hearing, but after a few records one realizes that all his improvisations are based on the same restricted circle of ideas, and in the end there is no music which more quickly provokes a state of exasperation and ennui. The best records of Duke Ellington, on the other hand, can be listened to again and again because they are not just decorations of a familiar shape but a new arrangement of shapes. Ellington, in fact, is a real composer, the first jazz composer of distinction, and the first Negro composer of distinction.79

From the artist who previously recorded the insouciantly titled standard ―It Don‘t Mean a

Thing if it Ain‘t Got that Swing,‖ Ellington sought to escape the myopic stylistic and contextual rules as well as the monotonous popular definitions of swing. He even sought to escape his own jungle based compositions, producing a work through ―Reminiscing‖ that prominently highlighted a harmonic structure that re-conceptualized the scope of jazz rhythm by augmenting the sonic capacities of standard rhythmic instruments (drums, bass) with brass instrumentation and providing counter melodies to the song that deepened the range of the overall rhythm. The result, in essence, betrays the expectations and precincts placed on African-American blues based and drum produced swing, initially popularized by Ellington and especially his contemporaries such as Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, and Cab Calloway who generally featured lead soloists and vocalists whose dominant melody would provide the primary (and often exclusive) sonic benchmark to the song.

Ellington explained his growing aversion to purely drum produced rhythmic centric music of swing, stating ―like the monotonous rhythmical bouncing of a ball. After you hear just so much, you get sick of it because it hasn‘t enough harmony and there isn‘t enough to

79 Tucker, ―The Renaissance Education of Duke Ellington,‖ 110. 55 it.‖80 Preferring, as John Franceschina would write, the ―color, harmony, (and) melody‖ of

African-American music that would ―far outlive the swing phenomenon.‖81

The Sound and Social Components of Ellington’s “Rhythm”

Ellington‘s reshaped musical focus recognized the limitations in popular swing as well as his own brand of jungle music. Seeking a deeper analysis and application of rhythm, Ellington publicly theorized his intensifying views with his article, ―The Duke

Steps Out;‖ a 1931 essay in which the then 32 year-old musician spoke candidly about the musical innovations, historical development, and present status of modern African-

American music. Given that the name of the publication was Rhythm, Ellington aptly concentrated on this specific aspect of music, targeting jazz and describing its rhythmic history from the multi-perspective of an African-American, a pioneering musical theorist, and a leading, progressive force in the development of American popular music. Focal to

Ellington‘s study was a discussion of ―natural law‖—a theory Ellington employed to describe the inherent artistic, social, political, and communal values of music that are expressed through a basis of rhythm.82 Succinctly, Ellington explains his discursive analysis of rhythm, stating that, ―our very lives are dependent on rhythm, for everything we do is governed by ordered rhythmic sequences.‖83 Ellington applied this concept of natural

80 Franceschina, Duke Ellington‟s Music for the Theatre, 21. 81 Franceschina, Duke Ellington‟s Music for the Theatre, 21. 82 The ―natural‖ qualities of rhythm are an expression of nature, in which Ellington connects the aspects of life and environment within an overall structure of rhythm. Ellington‘s application of the term ―law‖ is an expression of the consistency of the beat in which all things in the spectrum of nature may be active but ultimately remain connected and rooted within the basis of rhythm. 83 Ellington, ―The Duke Steps Out,‖ 22. 56 law as a pillar of the burgeoning identities of ―the colored races,‖ at home and abroad.84

Granting a theoretical outlook on the application of rhythm, Ellington‘s developing counter-minstrel identity was strengthened by a world-view that recognized the prevailing influence of African-American artistry. Locating rhythm as the primary basis for all musical expression deriving from an African heritage, Ellington states:

The music of my race is something more than the ―American idiom.‖ It is the result of our transplantation to the American soil, and was pure reaction in the plantation days to the tyranny we endured…It expresses our personality, and, right down in us, our souls react to the elemental but eternal rhythm, and the dance is timeless and unhampered by any lineal form.85

Ellington concludes his piece by remaining focused on the proposed societal functions of rhythm and discusses its role as an intangible feature of African based art and one that eclipses the boundaries of minstrelsy, musical form, and the vulnerabilities of historical dissemination.

What Ellington experimented with in jungle music and came to perfect with

―Reminiscing,‖ was a determination that the theoretical possibilities of rhythm could extend far past the musical categories proscribed by mainstream culture, thus unlocking an explicit language that allowed for non-lyrical music to supply an intellectual dialogue for a nascent culture to follow. Gunther Schuller‘s musicological analysis adds insight to

Ellington‘s innovative use of harmony to express rhythmic principles—principles that were investigated during his jungle period, but ultimately distinguished by ―Reminiscing.‖

Citing the use of a ―harmonic vamp‖ to establish the repetitive, and indeed, rhythmic nature

84 Ellington, ―The Duke Steps Out,‖ 22. This notion of a foundational concept representing emergent identities parallels the Clyde Woods theory of a ―blues epistemology,‖ whereas the blues represent a ―pillar‖ of identity for African-American culture in the shape of a rooted yet consistently expanding and influential culture. 85 Ellington, ―The Duke Steps Out,‖ 22. 57 of the song‘s main musical theme, Schuller adds that ―the flow of the piece was greatly aided by its single tempo throughout,‖ thus clarifying the piece‘s aversion to the up-tempo rhythms commonplace in swing jazz.86 Utilizing harmony for rhythmic purposes,

Ellington revises the template of swing jazz.87 Schuller comments on this approach, stating that, ―Ellington was composing music, not jazz necessarily.‖ Furthermore, Schuller states that:

In Reminiscing, more than ever before, he was trying to break out beyond the narrow categorizations of the commercial world which by an accident of fate he was forced to inhabit. He was determined more than ever before, to avoid the trap into which the market place and the obsession for labeling were trying to lure him to do.88

With these ―traps‖ in mind, Schuller‘s analysis also lends perspective to the artistic and commercially confining weight of minstrelsy on Ellington‘s work. Emphasizing the rhythmic possibilities of harmony presented a musical language that represented his clear departure from jungle style and the swing of his pears. And this musical departure indicates his formation of a viable counter-minstrel narrative.

In a truly modernist sense, Ellington‘s hybrid application of established rhythmic forms from both an African and African-American base with current and developing

86 Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era, 76-78. 87 Schuller comments, ―another passage of striking harmonic invention occurs near the end of side three (version 9 of the main theme). In its textual density, powerful polytonal harmonies striding across the theme in unison brass, and anchored by two basses grinding out deep parallel fifths, the passage is overwhelming in its dramatic intensity.‖ Schuller, The Swing Era, 80. Schuller also compliments ―Reminiscing‘s‖ harmonic innovations, arguing that the piece‘s use of flatted fifths and blue notes ―were arrived at by a process of extending harmonic structures upward.‖ Schuller, The Swing Era, 82. Thus, Schuller claims that Ellington‘s harmonic incorporation of the note most commonly associated with the melodic improvisations of Bop musicians was originally a feature of harmonic tradition, ―explicitly expressed and more consummately realized‖ in ―Reminiscing in Tempo.‖ Schuller, The Swing Era, 83. 88 Schuller, The Swing Era, 78. 58 musical trends directly exposed through a reapplication of harmony and rhythm reveal the theoretical framework of his artistry. Ellington‘s statement also infuses a specifically non- musical application to the ideals of jazz composition. Therefore, it‘s his incorporation of societal, cultural, and prototypically non-musical elements towards his music that allowed jazz access into the recesses of a broader idiom to represent the full social, political, and creative scope of the black public intellectual. Conceptualizing the social and cultural components of rhythm and jazz in general has seen numerous debates over the years.

Ellington‘s theories concerning the complexities of rhythm and natural law fall under a continuum perspective, in which the music accounts for its African roots and regardless of its diasporic displacement, has avoided the devastating effects of dissemination by remaining uniquely connected to its place of origin. This rhythmic continuum is contested by Kofi Agawu who challenged the very notion by rallying against a perspective of African cultural homogeneity and the widespread implication that African music can be collectively theorized without taking into account the seemingly limitless diversity of the enormous continent. Agawu states that, ―African rhythm, then is an invention, a construction, a fiction, a myth, ultimately a lie.‖89 Agawu‘s perspective argues that African-based rhythm serves as a vehicle for the preservation of myth, specifically on the part of white cultural observers who invented these Africanisms to propel both negative cultural stereotypes and the pervasive idea of European musical dominance, particularly in terms of championing the notated tradition over the improvised highly oral traditions typically associated with

African and African-American based music.90

89 Kofi Agawu, ―The Invention of ‗African Rhythm,― Journal of the American Musicological Society 48, no. 3, (Autumn, 1995): 387. 90 Agawu, ―The Invention of ‗African Rhythm,― 390. 59 Agawu also extends his critique to black artists and theorists as he states that their broad assessments on the rhythmic practices and artistic innovations of Africa ironically contribute to the overall dialogue of ―unanimist presuppositions,‖ advocated by white cultural theorists. As Agawu comments on the black discourse of appropriated Africanisms he designates these perspectives as part of a ―semantic field of rhythm,‖ concluding that there is, ―an unwillingness to lift the veil that now enshrouds Africa, a fear that doing so might have a civilizing effect on the discourse of the West, thus depriving its practitioners of one of their most cherished sources of fantasy and imaginative play.‖91

What Agawu states as the ―source of fantasy and imaginative play,‖ is a direct reference to the overall discourse concerning the musical and cultural practices of Africa and the Diaspora on the part of black nationalist activism and thought. The statement also suggests a problematic in the interpretation of the counter-minstrel identity being located in

Ellington‘s efforts to recalibrate rhythm and place his jazz outside of a minstrel spectrum.

The validity of Agawu‘s argument is apparent as the concept of Africanized rhythm is a long-standing staple of black intellectual discourse, complying with the grand notions of a shared community between Africa and its cultural descendents. Agawu‘s claims also account for the lingering notion of primitivism, a championed aspect of modernity with distinct racial overtones that still found a home in 1930‘s America primarily as an accompanying signifier of minstrelsy and marking black creative intellectualism, such as jungle music, as exotic, ―othered,‖ and authentically negro. However, Agawu‘s analysis confines the black artist creatively and intellectually—not in the premise behind his challenge of the mythical attributes commonly associated with measuring authentic black

91 Agawu, ―The Invention of ‗African Rhythm,‖ 390. 60 musical forms—but rather in the disregard for the new musical language being established that allows for artists like Ellington to ponder the possibilities of the ―natural law‖ of rhythm. The language is set upon Ellington‘s emergent paradigm of recalibrated African-

American and African musical principles, incorporating the oral traditions of transplanted

African rhythms into a notated format allowing the music to be dissected and analyzed without the burden of aesthetic mythology. Ellington‘s recalibration of rhythm for the purpose of gaining greater artistic depths alongside creating a tangible musical voice for the nascent black public intellectual culture was a shared process amongst black creative intellectuals during the 1930‘s.

This analysis finds a parallel with Larry Scanlon, who convincingly argues that the works of Langston Hughes fell ―under the general rubric of rhythm,‖ de-emphasizing rhythm as a subordinate musical feature when examining its role in media, musical pitch, and poetic meaning and instead, positing a grander notion of ―rhythmic consciousness‖ that became ―the basis of a distinctively modern notion of temporality.‖92 The merits of this connection were not lost on black social and cultural critics of the time as well. Locke‘s seminal 1936 work, ―The Negro and his Music‖ situates the musical idioms of black public and private intellectuals as formal and standardized expressions of American culture.

Previously, W.E.B. DuBois utilized music, specifically spirituals to represent a formalized

(and romanticized) interpretation of humanity as the ―rich childhood of a people‖ was celebrated through the revision of black folk musical forms.93 Avoiding the secular displays of blues and jazz DuBois focused on the sacred aesthetics of spirituals to represent

92 ―Larry Scanlon, ―Death is a Drum‘: Rhythm, Modernity, and the Negro Poet Laureate,‖ in Music and the Racial Imagination, ed. Philip Bohlman and Ronald Radano, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 511. 61 the precedent of culture, humanity, and intellectual expression within black musical forms.

Locke, realizing the popular effect of musicians such as Ellington, utilized modern music to represent a mark of distinction between the ideology of the Old and New Negro. As the decidedly African-American aesthetics embedded in jazz gave a sonic portrait to Locke‘s interpretive vision of the modern African-American, Locke‘s use of music provided a clear public discourse in the associations of music and politics. And with each instance, music is reclaimed for the purpose of developing an indispensable public vehicle for the emergent public discourse of black intellectuals.

The Radicalism of “Reminiscing”

Although quick to label himself merely as an artist without a political platform,

Ellington‘s augmented artistic focus and sporadic journalistic pursuits in the 1930s inevitably challenged this self-proclaimed stance. Throughout the 1930s Ellington affirmed the aesthetic virtues of African-American cultural forms, articulating in a self- penned music publication that:

We are children of the sun and our race has a definite tradition of beauty and glory and vitality that is as rich and powerful as the sun itself. These traditions are ours to express, and will enrich our careers in proportion to the sincerity and faithfulness with which we interpret them.94

Offering contextual accompaniment through his journalistic pursuits, Ellington emerged from the music community during this era as a vocal statesmen outlining the importance of jazz to the modern construction of a publicly intellectual, creative, and politically relevant

African-American. And 1935 served as defining moment for Ellington and jazz in general

93 Anderson, Deep River, 114. 94Duke Ellington, ―From Where I Lie,‖ The Negro Actor 1, no. 1, July 15, 1938, 4. 62 as the distinctive compositional framework of ―Reminiscing‖ provided a primary example of the emergent parallel engagements between music and politics within the nascent sphere of radical black public intellectuals.

The radicalism of Ellington‘s piece stemmed from his disillusionment with the current musical scene and his proscribed, relegated place within that environment. Written on a train during a tour of the segregated South, Ellington remarked that the piece emerged as a ―detailed account of my aloneness,‖ and although that statement refers to the loss of his mother, it also reflects the solitary results of Ellington‘s artistic ambition to create relevant and progressive music in spite of the preconceived parameters black artists faced in a minstrelized society. 95 In a 1939 article written by Ellington the artist recounts this ambition, offering a critique that reflected on the static levels of creativity in the 1930s musical scene.

The most significant thing that can be said about swing music today is that it has become stagnant. Nothing of importance, nothing new, nothing either original or creative has occurred in the swing field...It becomes necessary to adopt a far-seeing and mature point of view when considering the current popularity of swing, revising in the mind‘s eye its inception, the conditions and circumstances surrounding its birth and growth and the completion of the cycle as it appears today.96

Outwardly concerned about music, his plan of ―revision‖ revealed an urge to interpret and contextualize swing from a newly politicized and societal format.97 Ellington‘s statement also broadly indicated his need for the reader to externalize music beyond its proscribed capacity to entertain by recognizing its integral link to the realities of African-American

95 Steed, Duke Ellington: A Spiritual Biography, 68. 96 Duke Ellington, ―Duke Says Swing is Stagnant,‖ Down Beat, February 1939, 16. 97 This sense of revision is a topic often visited by Ellington. In a response to whether or not black music should contain ―social criticism‖ Ellington‘s response was a definitive ―absolutely.‖ Edward Morrow, ―Duke Ellington on Gershwin‘s ‗Porgy,‖ 6. 63 culture and life.98 Although Ellington had little praise for the field of swing his commitment to ―revising‖ the structural framework of jazz for the sake of augmenting its creative and social relevance is ideologically parallel the Popular Front surges of the 1930‘s which embarked to unite the principles of diverse leftist organizations to revise the political traditions of the country and create a relevant, active, and politically viable African-

American populous.

In fact, Ellington was embarking on an ideological pursuit to expand the artistic and societal scope of jazz, made clear by his declaration to restructure the format whenever necessary.99 As Ellington speaks of ―conditions and circumstances,‖ he hints at the importance of recognizing political, social, and cultural change outside of the field of music. His perspective tangibly links the disparate forces of art and politics to synthesize a parallel engagement that symbiotically exists to define one another. In other words,

Ellington recognizes that progressive jazz potentially served a multi-functional purpose of defining and representing the changes of a politicized world and simply that the complexities of emergent, creative communities, like the black public intellectuals of a post-Harlem generation cannot be understood without understanding its art, and in this case, its jazz. And it was this vanguard, ―far-seeing,‖ approach and overall need for musical change that marked ―Reminiscing‖ as a defining moment in jazz. A moment

98 Hasse cites the perspective of Rex Stewart, who commented on the ―vast new vistas‖ in Ellington‘s sound that gave way to ―an entire new spectrum of emotional experiences.‖ The creations of these musical ―vistas,‖ perhaps, coincide with Ellington‘s preference of referring to his art as ―Negro music,‖ allowing for a broader social and cultural association between music and racial politics of the 1930s. Hasse, Beyond Category, 203. 99 Hasse states, ―Ellington‘s music exceeded the conventions, accomplishments, and boundaries of swing; gradually and increasingly, in fact, no single musical category could contain Ellington.‖ Hasse, Beyond Category, 203. 64 where radicalism took sonic form—expressed directly through the piece‘s progressive changes to the standard compositional approach to jazz, thus creating an associative musical dialogue for the community of intellectuals concerned with black societal uplift during the era. From these aspects along with the numerous debates of critics concerning the piece, Ellington‘s artistry provided a sonic benchmark and musical paradigm for an emergent culture of post-Harlem Renaissance black intellectuals to express the social, artistic, and importantly, political concerns of their nascent community.

Entering the music scene of the mid-1930s, critic Leonard Hibbs scrutinized

―Reminiscing‖ for its ―repetitive‖ nature yet submitted that from the emotional quality of the piece, ―that Duke has allowed us to tune in on his mind at work.‖100 In a scholarly analysis of Ellington‘s various works, A. H. Lawrence surmised that, ―Hibbs‘s discussion made ‗Reminiscing in Tempo,‘ the first work in the jazz idiom—‗Rhapsody in Blue‘ not withstanding—to receive such critical analysis.‖101 Horace Van Norman remarked on the value of the piece, claiming it a ―work of incalculable importance,‖ to the current scene of jazz and African-American creative production.102 Vocalist Mel Torme also commented on the place of ―Reminiscing‖ within the genre‘s history, but also on its racially progressive musical functionality, stating, ―to me, that piece of music said it all…It was every back stair in Chicago, all the frustration and misery and beauty of the black friends

I‘d had in my youth. It was eight years before its time.‖103

However, in a scene dominated by dance friendly, blues based, post-ragtime swing, along with his jungle imitators, ―Reminiscing,‖ was largely labeled as an un-welcomed

100 Lawrence, Duke Ellington and His World, 196. 101 Lawrence, Duke Ellington and His World, 196. 102 Lawrence, Duke Ellington and His World, 196. 65 addition to the musical landscape of the era.104 Although heralded in a column of the

American Music Lover as the producer of ―the most significant American music being created today,‖ Ellington and his piece withstood a barrage of criticism from a variety of critics indicting the musician as ―a failure and betrayer of the The Cause because he no longer writes any Black and Tans or Mood Indigos.‖105 Indeed, a change from the lighter fare of Ellington‘s prior work had begun, as his music stepped away from the accessible format of swing to reflect a more academic approach towards jazz composition. A trend encouraged by the generation of black intellectuals who spawned from the ashes of the

Harlem Renaissance and began to locate the modern incarnations of jazz outside of its blues-oriented, New Orleans, romanticized background and instead as a product of the leftist values that circulated amongst black public intellectuals during the New Deal.

Defending Ellington‘s extended work, American critic Enzo Archetti commented that other critics, ―dismissed (‗Reminiscing‘) as a failure without any attempt being made to analyze or understand the work.‖106 He further commented on the challenging nature of the music, stating, ―to them it was something in which the rhythm could not be tapped out with a foot nor the melody whistled.‖107 However, Archetti‘s praise stood virtually unaided as critics such as John Hammond lined up to bash Ellington‘s new found approach noting the ―tragedy‖ of Ellington‘s latest ―long, rambling monstrosity,‖ associating the disconnected nature of the piece and its discordant relationship with the popular swing

103 Lawrence, Duke Ellington and His World, 196. 104 Hasse mentions that ―Ellington would have an uneasy relationship with the phenomenon of swing,‖ and that Ellington ―was slighted in the early years of swing.‖ Hasse, Beyond Category, 196. 105 Enzo Archetti, ―In Defense of Ellington and His ‗Reminiscing in Tempo,‖ American Music Lover 1, April 1936, 359. 106 Archetti, ―In Defense of Ellington and His ‗Reminiscing in Tempo,‖ 359. 66 music of the time with an assertion that Ellington and his music were culturally, socially, and politically irrelevant as he strived to avoid ―the troubles of his people or mankind in general.‖108

This assessment of Ellington, his piece, and its overall critical reception brings into focus the developing political resonance of his counter-minstrel narrative. And although

Hammond‘s accusations work to render his work as irrelevant or even dangerous to the political survival of African-Americans and the leftist ideologies that represented them, the challenge itself places Ellington‘s new artistic focus into an unwaveringly politicized category. In effect, Ellington and his art are no longer part of the everyday scene; they are radicalized as the critical interpretation of the music is brought into a context where its social and political importance is evaluated just as thoroughly as the music itself. As a result, his music escapes the predictable confines of swing to represent the newly adapted focus of a different generation of ―musician thinkers‖—a black creative intellectual whose music worked to influence conceptual and restructural artistic change, thus publically creating a sonic forum for the expression of African-American themed social, cultural, and political affairs to the mainstream.109 Through this piece, Ellington stands as a primary example of a musician thinker; escaping the racialized confines of the minstrelized swing scene with a musical departure that signaled the formation of a counter-minstrel narrative.

―Reminiscing in Tempo‖ also signified a touchstone for a valid association between jazz and radical politics, specifically the Marxism of African-Americans in the era of the

107 Archetti, ―In Defense of Ellington and His ‗Reminiscing in Tempo,‖ 360. 108 John Hammond, ―The Tragedy of Duke Ellington, the ‗Black Prince of Jazz,‖ Down Beat Magazine, November 1935, 6. 67 New Deal. With Reminiscing, Ellington designed a creative pathway to technically and musically break free from the minstrelized standards of Tin Pan Alley and the racialized tastes of the mainstream audience. In a 1934 article from the New Challenge, Richard

Wright, under a supposition of Marxism, spoke of the dynamics in which black public intellectuals traversed racist expectations in the pursuit of greater artistic and ideological freedoms. Wright states, ―It is through a Marxian conception of reality and society that the maximum degree of freedom in thought and feeling can be gained for the Negro writer.‖110

Wright further adds that, ―this dramatic Marxist vision, when consciously grasped, endows the writer with a sense of dignity which no other vision can give.‖111 Wright‘s use of the term Marxian speaks volumes to the weight of his central message. The term represents a broader framework of thought concerning the principles of black Marxists and those even merely inspired by Marxist ideology to create a new ―conception of reality and society,‖ in order to achieve the ―maximum degree of freedom.‖ Wright‘s description of literature‘s association with politics caters to the parties and people invested in alternate strategies and unorthodox pathways towards freedom, furthermore stating that the basis of Marxist ideology serves as an avenue for greater intellectual empowerment. Ellington‘s 1935 piece speaks to this association as its very design acted as a portal towards greater artistic and intellectual agency within a racially and artistically marginalized environment. This is not to suggest that ―Reminiscing‖ was a direct signifier of Marxism. However, given that

Marxism is central to the milieu of black public intellectuals and their influential discourse

109 A number of scholars, including Erenberg have theorized on similar topics relating to the social, cultural, and politicized role of jazz and its musicians. See Erenberg, Swingin‟ the Dream, 101. 110 Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Quill, 1984), 185. 68 of black freedom, Ellington fits this mold as defined by Wright as his compositions place him in the category of a ―Negro writer‖ who sought to escape his minstrelized surroundings in order to produce unrestrained, meaningful, and progressive art.

Conclusion

In 1936, Alain Locke pointed to ―Reminiscing‖ and explicitly labeled Ellington as

―the pioneer of super-jazz,‖ commenting on his ability to create a piece that bridged the folk elements and blues principles of African-American centered art with the modern, worldly, and uniquely innovative field of modern jazz.112 Committed to upholding cosmopolitan folk principles (―the music of my race‖) in a musical language that combated the trappings of an oppressive culture Ellington commented with Lockian regard, ―I am therefore now engaged on a rhapsody unhampered by any musical form in which I intend to portray the experiences of the coloured races in America in the syncopated idiom.‖113

Indeed, Ellington found himself and his art by the mid 1930s establishing an alternative musical paradigm and one that would be directly accompanied by the nascent yet viable public intellectual community of African-Americans. Intrinsically, as the music began to change and reflect Ellington‘s aversion, distrust, and impatience with the current scene, so did the encompassing politicized dialogue which made its way in the scene since the beginnings of the Harlem Renaissance over a decade earlier. Ellington and his music became a figure piece of expression for public black intellectuals. Locke again, praised

Ellington for emphasizing and developing ―the more serious aspects of jazz,‖ in accordance

111 Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 185. 112 Anderson, Deep River, 166. 113 Ellington, ―The Duke Steps Out,‖ 21. 69 with his New Negro philosophy that identified the social political and cultural responsibilities of public intellectuals.114 The piece was also reflective of a new era in popular jazz, in large part spearheaded by Ellington, that extended the parameters of swing towards a more open and personalized musical structure, engaging its down home blues based roots along with the cosmopolitan and ultimately modern artistic ideals presented in the composite theories of the New Negro. In essence, the music was no longer limited to the confines of radio friendly dance music, or even swing for that matter. The music began to reflect the imagery pronounced through the modern ideals of African-American intellectual culture providing a creative template for the emerging radical and politicized community of black artists and thinkers. And by the 1930s, the transmission of these politicized and intellectual ideals found a unique sonic vehicle in the acculturated forms of progressive jazz.

114 Anderson, Deep River, 162-166. 70

Chapter 2: “A People’s Music;” The Jazz Community, Communism, and Counter- Minstrel Strategies

“For most critics and historians, the story of jazz and the Left has been a curious dance of black musicians with „natural instincts‟ and slumming white leftists.”1

The Feud and the Fractured Discourse of Racial Politics

Prior to the release of his controversial 1935 piece, bandleader Duke Ellington emerged from his first professional stint as a member of the Washingtonians to become an established jazz superstar, gaining worldwide attention as the music and artistry of African-

Americans steadily gained recognition on radio and bandstands at home and abroad.2

While setting course in 1933 for a European tour after a successful three-month gig at the

Cotton Club, Ellington was paid a visit by John Hammond who came to bid his friend bon voyage, equipped with gifts and good wishes, all of which, recalled Ellington, were, ―very good, nothing but the best, just like the man who gave them to me.”3 Widely known as a resource, patron, and friend to a number of black artists, Hammond was an integral insider and public figure in the jazz scene who critically observed its meteoric rise in popularity from the mid 1930s on to the WWII era. From an investigation of Hammond‘s role in the swing scene and specifically his relationship with Ellington, a template is revealed that brings into focus the ways in which leftist whites and black public intellectuals forged an uneasy discourse concerning interracial politics in the New Deal era leading into the 1940s.

Beginning with an interrogation of this example, this chapter will examine how jazz

1 Denning, The Cultural Front, 324. 2 Edward Kennedy Ellington, Music is My Mistress (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973), 82-83. 3 Stuart Nicholson, Reminiscing in Tempo: A Portrait of Duke Ellington (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999), 131-132. 71 acquired its political trajectory. This chapter will also locate the developments of the counter minstrel narrative on the ground level and examine how jazz was eventually utilized as a functional tool for the public expression of a leftist agenda within the communal spheres of the Popular Front.

Before the documented collapse of their relationship as a result of Hammond‘s public assertions that Ellington‘s work had become artistically and socially irrelevant with the release of ―Reminiscing,‖ the artist had shared a friendship and successful working relationship with Hammond—who in addition to his role as a patron of the arts was a noted record producer, music critic, and ceaseless activist for the cause of civil justice in a racially segregated nation.4 Hammond‘s illustrious career began in the early 1930‘s as a columnist for Melody Maker, as well as the British publications Gramophone and Rhythm.

Simultaneously, Hammond immersed himself in the industry and artistic circles of black popular music, critiquing the works of black public creative intellectuals from multiple artistic genres and fostering their talent as a scout and recording engineer for a wide variety of jazz and blues musicians across the country.

Hammond‘s work earned the generalist a prominent voice within the increasingly politicized atmosphere of the swing scene, infusing a viable social commentary into his musical reviews that exposed the racist practices and parameters that continually plagued

4 Regarding Hammond‘s assessment of Ellington‘s work, Robin Kelley puts forth an analysis that surveys this push amongst leftists, specifically Communists to engage their art with societal issues. Kelley notes the criticisms of black Harlemite William L. Patterson in 1928, who called upon poets and composers of ―Negro songs,‖ to adopt, as Kelley states, ―revolutionary verse that described the conditions of the black masses and captured the traditions of resistance instead of catering to patrons.‖ Robin Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press, 1994), 109-110. 72 African-American musicians in the cultural industry of the Popular Front.5 The popularity and political strength of Hammond‘s commentary also stemmed from his unabashed extolling of the unique aesthetic qualities of African-American art, revealing an unfalteringly racialized perspective that culturally designated African-Americans as the crucial progenitors and arbiters of black folk-derived art and American popular music in general.6 Concurrently committed to issues of civil and social rights, Hammond utilized

African-American music as a symbolic apparatus to display the principle virtues of integration, putting these views into practice by breaking the age-old minstrelized taboo of interracial recording and performing by bringing together ―white musicians like Benny

Goodman and Jack Teagarden and black musicians like Frank Newton and Shirley Clay to back Bessie Smith and Billie Holliday,‖ to mark, ―the beginning of integrated jazz recording.‖7 With Hammond‘s work utilizing the platform of jazz to editorialize against racial exploitation and segregated social policy, including the ―discrimination in the recording companies, radio networks and musicians‘ unions,‖ Hammond played a decisive

5 Michael Denning reports, ―Hammond was one of the first producers to record racially integrated bands; he wrote pseudonymous attacks on the exploitation of recording artists for the New Masses; and he produced the landmark Spirituals to Swing concerts of 1938 and 1939 that presented a remarkable range of African American vernacular music and brought musicians like Sonny Terry, Meade Lux Lewis, and the Golden Gate Quartet to National attention.‖ Denning, The Cultural Front, 90-91. 6 David Stowe‘s work analyzes the various facets of Hammond‘s activism and critical readings of black music and puts forth a perspective that brings Hammond‘s racially biased dialogue under close analysis. Stowe states that, ―perhaps the most controversial among Hammond‘s critical positions was his outspoken belief that blacks played superior swing. ‗The best of the white folk still cannot compare to the really good Negroes in relaxed, unpretentious dance music,‘ he was quoted as saying, an opinion that struck many as ‗clearly intolerant,‘ according to the New Yorker.‖ Stowe‘s analysis also reveals Hammond‘s reluctance to evince ―an interest in revealing the systemic causes of racial inequality in the swing industry,‖ complicating Hammond‘s relationship to the cause of equality amongst the black musicians he assisted. See Stowe, Swing Changes, 55-65. 7 Denning, The Cultural Front, 336-337. 73 role in not only popularizing, but implementing a politicized subtext in the public discussion of jazz.8 Furthermore, Hammond efficiently used the genre‘s celebrity to assist in the cause of civil rights and vaulting the art to worldwide recognition in order to display the creative and intellectual ingenuity of African-Americans in the face of systematic racial oppression.

While born into affluence as the great grandson of railroad mogul William Henry

Vanderbilt, Hammond‘s lifelong commitment towards the cause of public activism redirected his seemingly preordained trajectory. Operating from personal funds and connections, Hammond acted on behalf of public platforms that vociferously advocated the cause of civil rights and the ―authentic music of the American Negro.‖9 Although monitored by the F.B.I. as a ―fellow traveler,‖ due to his lavish output of leftist affiliated activism, Hammond avoided these labels and preferred to traffic his political agenda amongst the broad liberal spectrum of the Popular Front for various causes of social reform.10 Hammond‘s work however, ideologically aligned with Communist cultural critics on a variety of fronts, specifically in their mutual exaltation of the more ―genuine‖

8 Denning, The Cultural Front, 336. 9 The quote is from John Hammond, ―From Spirituals to Swing, New York Times, December 18, 1938, 159. Erenberg also elaborates on this mission of Hammond‘s, and challenges Stowe‘s perspective on Hammond and the musical industry. Erenberg states that, ―Hammond‘s many activities make it clear that the effort to integrate big bands and other musical institutions and to bring recognition to black artists drew on the support of the organized Left during the 1930s.‖ See Stowe, Swing Changes, 130-139. 10 Stowe, Swing Changes, 62. Stowe‘s analysis covers the majority of Hammond‘s association with Communist and leftist radicals, from the National Scottsboro Action Committee in 1933, the National Committee for Defense of Political Prisoners in 1934, the NAACP in 1935, and the Citizens‘ Committee in 1941, a mostly Communist organization that also spurred a J. Edgar Hoover to take ―a personal interest in Hammond‘s case.‖ Stowe, Swing Changes, 62. Stowe also states that, ―Hammond‘s ideology was remarkably clear and consistent. He was fundamentally a Progressive, a high-minded crusader whose 74 folk and blues derived expressions of African Americans that, as Robin Kelley describes,

―at least implicitly, if not explicitly‖ were marked as ―revolutionary.‖11 Although not a member of the Communist Party, Hammond‘s promotion of what Kelley also refers to as the ―proletarian realism‖ reportedly inherent of black, folk, cultural expression summarized his mutual interests with the Communist sects of the organized left engaged in African-

American affairs.12 This persistent adulation of a resistive black folk culture revealed by

Hammond‘s work and the activist writings of white leftist cultural critics in the mid to late

1930s demonstrated the often complicated dynamics that existed between Communist and

African-American public intellectuals concerning the liberal politics of race. Inadvertently essentializing black ―folk‖ culture to minstrelized proportions, Hammond‘s template of celebratory analysis was strictly defined by its racial distinctions. Furthermore,

Hammond‘s analysis complicated the progress of interracial cooperative politics by proposing a set of racialized boundaries to determine the societal and artistic relevance of black creative intellectuals.

The racially dogmatic assumptions of this discourse illustrated the driving impetus behind his feud with Ellington. Hammond‘s severely titled 1935 article, ―the Tragedy of

social background, energy, and temperament in a previous generation might have attracted him to, and evoked comparisons with, Theodore Roosevelt. Stowe, Swing Changes, 62-63. 11 Furthermore, Robin Kelley comments on the tendency of Communist cultural critics, who ―like most American interpreters of culture, they tended to place virtually everything black people did under the rubric of ‗folk.‖ Kelley further assesses the ―paradoxically limited vision of African-American culture,‖ that emerged as a result of holding ―on to an essentialist, race-bound definition of culture.‖ Kelley, Race Rebels, 116. 12 Kelley, Race Rebels, 116. Kelley explains this label as part of an essentializing and ―limited vision of African American culture.‖ Kelley explains the debates ―which raged over the meaning of ‗proletarian realism,‖ of folk expressions, specifically in its liberal application amongst Communist and liberal cultural critics, as Kelley details that, ―folk artists were not subject to the same criticism and scrutiny that ‗legitimate‘ intellectuals faced.‖ Kelley, Race Rebels, 116. 75 Duke Ellington,‖ clarified the general tenets of the fractured dialogue that publically emerged between black and white leftist intellectuals concerning the function of black art in 1930s American society. Issued as a response to the ―complete sterility‖ of Ellington‘s most recent works and specifically ―Reminiscing,‖ Hammond classified Ellington‘s artistry as ―vapid without the slightest semblance of guts,‖ in reference to his claim that Ellington‘s work no longer represented the genuine articulations of black folk culture and therefore the circulating radical racial politics of the New Deal era.13 Specifically, Hammond‘s analysis focused on ―the Duke himself,‖ in an effort to expose the non-revolutionary, socially irrelevant state of his artistic interests. Hammond‘s conclusions resulted from a racialized perspective, observing Ellington‘s seemingly classically inclined musical ambitions as the

―slick, un-negroid‖ force that ―keeps himself from thinking about such problems as those southern share croppers, the Scottsboro boys,‖ regardless of Hammond‘s take that

Ellington was ―too intelligent not to know that these all do exist.‖14 Hammond‘s critique positions Ellington as a minstrelized figure and an instrument of the designs of white mainstream culture made manifest through his composition of ―Reminiscing.‖ Unable to

―stand up for even his most elemental rights,‖ Hammond further states that Ellington sought a ―superficial resemblance‖ in his artistry to ―Debussy and Delius,‖ thus evidencing a minstrelized status as Hammond proclaims the distorted cultural, aesthetic, and political values of Ellington in his attempt to meet a white standard of artistic merit.15

Ironically, Hammond was also instituting a ―white‖ standard of artistic merit for black musicians to follow. The content of Hammond‘s critique was consistent with his

13 Hammond, ―The Tragedy of Duke Ellington, the ‗Black Prince of Jazz,‖ 6. 14 Hammond, ―The Tragedy of Duke Ellington, the ‗Black Prince of Jazz,‖ 6. 15 Hammond, ―The Tragedy of Duke Ellington, the ‗Black Prince of Jazz,‖ 6. 76 publicized efforts to promote a folk-oriented authenticity within black cultural forms, as further evidenced in his reviews of classically trained black musicians such as Paul

Robeson and Marian Anderson, and ―the highly publicized Negro jazz bands, some of whom have made serious concessions to white taste by adding spurious showmanship to their wares and imitating the habits and tricks of the more commercially successful white orchestras.‖16 Conversely, Hammond‘s promotion of the ―un-buttoned, never-too- disciplined,‖ blues oriented swing of artists such as Billie Holliday and Count Basie, articulated the counter-perspective of Hammond‘s racialized analysis—an analysis

Hammond championed, that favored the blacker acts to fully represent the revolutionary, folk-inspired articulations of African-American culture.17 Furthermore, Hammond‘s overview demarcated a separate discursive space where leftist whites concerned with the cause of black freedom became arbiters themselves, of the artistic merit, cultural value, and political validity of black cultural expression.18

Reacting to the marginalizing attacks on his works, Ellington issued forth his own judgment of ―the ‗modus operandi,‖ of Hammond and the swing scene.19 Labeling

Hammond as ―an ardent propagandist and champion of the ‗lost cause,‖ Ellington resorts to red-baiting Hammond to express his displeasure with the ―slightly warped‖ vehemence of

Hammond‘s self-appointed role as a public intermediary of black social and political freedom ―in the form of the Communist Party.‖20 Whereas Hammond‘s article calls upon

16 Stowe, Swing Changes, 61. 17 Erenberg, Swingin‟ the Dream, 127. 18 Erenberg, Swingin‟ the Dream, 127. 19 Duke Ellington, ―Situation Between the Critics and Musicians is ‗Laughable‘- Ellington,‖ Down Beat Magazine, April 1939, 9. 20 Ellington, ―Situation Between the Critics and Musicians is ‗Laughable‘— Ellington,‖ 9. Ellington states, ―he apparently has consistently identified himself with the 77 Ellington to represent ―the cause‖ of black civil rights, Ellington‘s expression speaks to the failed efforts of the Left, and specifically the CP to effectively act on behalf of African-

American freedom struggles outside of the rhetorical discourse commonly associated to the

―cause.‖ And alongside the speculations of Ellington‘s exploitative personal critique lies the foundational language of a powerful challenge to the validity of the discursive space that Hammond had drawn out regarding the assumed cultural agency of Communist and leftist whites concerned with the issues of black freedom.21

Commenting on the exchange, David Stowe proposes that the feud was ―unique‖ but ultimately, ―emblematic of a relationship that was crucial in shaping the music and cultural meaning of swing.‖22 Lewis Erenberg argues along similar lines that the feud and the contributions of ―young jazz critics and impresarios,‖ gave ―jazz a specific ideological content.‖23 Alongside these views this chapter similarly contends that the ideological meanings that circulated within the dialogue of the feud helped to firmly placed jazz within

interests of the minorities, the Negro peoples, to a lesser degree, the Jew, and to the underdog, in the form of the Communist party.‖ Ellington, ―Situation Between the Critics and Musicians is ‗Laughable‘—Ellington,‖ 9. 21 However, Ellington‘s challenge of white influence over black cultural forms ironically echoed a familiar tone of his own, as a 1935 review of ―Porgy and Bess‖ recalled Ellington‘s promotion of the ―genuine‖ aesthetics of black ―folk‖ culture in spite of his subsequent labeling of these same cultural tropes as an irretrievable standard for white composers. Commenting on the popularity of the Gershwin brother‘s work, Ellington remarks tepidly that it was ―a swell play, I guess,‖ further surmising that ―the music did not hitch with the mood and spirit of the story,‖ and concluding that, ―I have noted this in other things lately too.‖ Furthermore, when asked whether an ―honest Negro play would contain social criticism,‖ Ellington responded, ―absolutely,‖ clarifying, ―that is, if it is expected to hold up.‖ And focusing on the ―authentic‖ aesthetics of black cultural expression, Ellington declares that ―Porgy and Bess,‖ despite its popularity and musical appeal, ―does not use the Negro musical idiom,‖ further citing its lack of blues oriented influence by stating, ―it was the music of Catfish Row or any kind of Negroes.‖ Morrow, ―Duke Ellington on Gershwin‘s ‗Porgy,‖ 6. 22 Stowe, Swing Changes, 52. 23 Erenberg, Swingin‟ the Dream, 122. 78 a politicized context. However, what the feud ultimately comes to symbolize is the problematic that Ellington noted in his critique of the ―warped‖ politics expressed by the

Left concerning matters of race. In their dialogue, Ellington is clearly familiar with the politicized discourse Hammond wields, but he is also sharply dissenting from the minstrelized proportions exerted by the practicioners and purveyors of the so-called progressive left. What the feud broadcasted were the demarcated discursive spaces of black and white Leftist intellectuals and the continuous fractured dialogue, mired in minstrelized rhetoric that existed in their associative struggle for black freedom. And this chapter seeks to clarify some of the uneven, fraught relationship that existed between

African-American creative public intellectuals and the racialized ideals expressed by

Marxist activists of the Popular Front.

The content of Chapter one focused on Ellington‘s piece, which served as a catalyst for jazz‘s construction of a musical language that exposed the modernized developments of political resonance in jazz music itself and signified the ways in which musical innovation and aurality evidenced an alternative textual language to transmit (through a counter- minstrel narrative) the public agenda of black public intellectuals. The chapter also positioned Ellington among the ranks of black public intellectuals in the age of the New

Deal, utilizing jazz to discursively engage in the politicized schema of a minstrelized public. Chapter two works to further this investigation by localizing the discourse of black public intellectuals, those concerned with the endeavors of black public intellectuals and the overall effect of this broad, Leftist political influence on black art. Fundamentally, this chapter examines the politics involved with jazz on the ground level to observe how the music‘s eventual correspondence with the Left in media and music venues further shaped

79 and in some cases, delegitimized its developing presence as a counter-minstrel narrative.

Following the examination of ―Reminiscing in Tempo‖ as paradigmatic for the stylistic changes of jazz and its transformation into a form of political articulation, this chapter ultimately locates the interchange between ideology and musical form within specific settings of the Marxist and black public culture. Therefore, this investigation will identify the spaces where the radical sonic discourse was formulated and dispersed, tracing how the

Left's influence on music culture took shape in an effort to broadcast the activist sentiment and general influence of the developing counter-minstrel narrative in jazz.

Broadly, my analysis begins from the period in which Communists rethought black culture, and moves to a more specific understanding of how the Left's interest in black culture eventually shaped the political radicalization of jazz. By insisting that this process occurred not only through artistic innovation and individual creativity but through political formation, my analysis is able to add insight into how the Left's eventual deployment of jazz was part of a total acculturation process that affected the general work of black public intellectuals as well as the minstrelized milieu of the jazz era. Therefore, what follows begins with a historicized outlook of the ways in which Marxist principles were mapped onto the wide social, cultural, and political agenda of black public intellectuals. This chapter, therefore, contends that the black adaptation of Marxism was a part of the cumulative non-musical counter-minstrel strategies that resisted the dominant discourses that subjugated African-Americans. Secondly, this chapter observes the engagements between the Communist Party and black cultural media in order to eventually discern how the Left, and specifically the Communist Party fostered a dominant political trajectory for jazz to follow. This chapter, however, will also observe how this Marxist trajectory

80 inadvertantly supported Ellington‘s critique of ―warped‖ politics by inevitably structuring a minstrelized setting within its discourse of racial freedom, thereby loosening the

―proletarian realism‖ claim of the Left that Marxism constitutes the only counter-minstrel discourse. By its conclusion, this chapter situates and conceptualizes jazz in its physical and discursive Leftist settings, identifying the spaces where this influence took shape, where its discourse formulated, and where its circulating displays of radical activism occurred.

Communism and Black Public Intellectuals

As African-Americans slowly forged a path towards the spheres of mainstream

American culture, black intellectuals began to fully discern the overwhelming dichotomy of modernity as it specifically pertained to the public and private realms of African-

American life.24 The dichotomy of black modernity was identified by a division between the ideal perspectives of the black modernist and the societal realities that the modernist continually faced in the pursuit of cultural freedoms. The realities of black modernity immediately identified a widely illiterate, disenfranchised, and scattered mass of largely

Southern transplants—facing the quotidian realties of violence and racialized subjugation

24 Constructed from the myriad of influences that shaped the lives of black people, Paul Gilroy speaks of black modernity mostly from diasporic terms—signifying a sense of racial commonality but located outside of a definitive and often biological specification of race. However, Gilroy‘s analysis offers insight towards modernity and the African American public intellectual of the post-Depression era by identifying black identity as an ―open category,‖ theorizing not only on ―diasporic spatiality,‖ but in the contention of identity with ― historicity, memory, and narrativity‖ as the ―articulating principles‖ of the black political spheres that emerged as a result of modernity. In other words, Gilroy‘s focus allows for a discussion of the counter-minstrel narrative and understanding this alternative branch of ―narrativity‖ as an integral signifier of black identity and modernity. 81 as well as the persistent effects of an intensely segregated racial climate. In essence, the marginalized realities of modernity issued forth a fractured composite of the 1930s ―Negro character‖—a constructed character composed of fraudulent and minstrelized stereotypes— relegated towards an oppressed and subjugated status as a result of the lack of political, economic, and individualized agency experienced within the racialized hierarchy of

American mainstream culture.

This character, however, was also comprised of the ideal perspectives of the modern, post-Harlem, publicly intellectual African-American—represented by an assortment of activists whose alternate perception of the potential of blacks to acquire individual (and subsequently, communal) agency within the American mainstream worked to combat the harsh realities of modernity expressed through Jim Crow and their minstrelized surroundings. Alongside the economic, social, and political campaigns and reforms put forth by activists in the era, the ideal perspective of the black modernist centered upon redefining the perception of the Negro as an enlightened, autonomous

Americanized entity—an entity that drew individual strength from its heritage but was ultimately committed to the ideals of the American mainstream and the potential of inclusion within this societal framework.

Concerned with this inclusion and eager to gain a wider base of constituents was the Communist Party, which localized more formally under the organizational framework of the Communist Party of the United States of America. Along with the more leftist wing of the Socialist Party, the CP originally consisted primarily of whites looming over black communities with a small yet noticeable presence, forging interracial campaigns to assist

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: 82 southern black farm workers before WWI, and proposing over the years a number of plans concerning unionization, the enforcement of civil rights, and the call for a separate ―Black

Belt Republic‖ in designated areas with a majority black population.25 Recognizing the merits and inherent power of a constituent mass the concept of a Black Nation transitioned over the years to compensate for the migrating masses of African-Americans transitioning from the agrarian Southern economy towards the industrialized zones of the North and

Mid-West.26 As potential African-American constituents exited the South, the thesis built upon a semi-static constituent mass adapted towards the broadly defined the broadly defined Negro Question, a conceptual platform designed to inclusively represent the

Harvard UP, 1992), 185-192. 25 Ideologically acculturated by its black constituents, the various sects of the SP that emerged in black communities became more engaged in the logistical matters of race as segregated trade unions, Jim Crow laws, and lynch mobs became the focus of attack of by the early 1920‘s. These individual sects of the SP also clarified ideological lines of division, sparring diligently with the nationalist and perceived imperialistic tenets of Marcus Garvey and his ―back to Africa‖ movement for African-Americans. In a 1924 issue of the Crisis, DuBois, then considered a moderate Socialist, launched an attack on Garvey, branding the nationalist as ―a lunatic or a traitor,‖ stating, ―Marcus Garvey, is without a doubt, the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and in the world.‖ W. E. B. DuBois, Crisis, Vol. 28, May 1924, 8-9. In addition, W.A. Domingo, a Jamaican journalist and Socialist educator branded Garvey a ―virtual dictator,‖ questioning his rise to prominence and his overall character, labeling the tenor of his Nationalist efforts, ―with an ungenerousness that is despicable, and an unscrupulousness of methods that is beyond the pale of decency.‖ W. A. Domingo, ―Figures Never Lie, But Liars Do Figure,‖ The Crusader, 13, File on the African Blood Brotherhood, 1:1, Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University (New York). Garvey‘s nationalism conflicted with the practice of traditional Marxist politics amongst African American in Socialist and Communist circles. These public displays signaled the extreme philosophical diversity amongst black modernist public intellectuals yet allowed for Socialist politics and the overall discourse of Marxism to gain a viable footing within the developing platform of African-American political culture. However, due to the infighting between party members, as well as the Red Scare and Palmer Raids which fractured the party‘s ability to ―strike deep political roots‖ the SP floundered in the emergent vacuum of black centered leftist politics in post WW1 America. Mark Naison, Communists In Harlem During The Depression (Urbana and Chicago: University Of Illinois Press, 1983), 4. 83 placement and status of black affairs under both a Communist political system and a

Marxist discourse.27

By 1933, intellectuals such as W.E.B. DuBois continued to bridge the political ideology of Marxism with the growing racially-based concerns of African-Americans.

Summarizing the foundational strength of the associative threads, DuBois proclaimed that,

―we see in Karl Marx a colossal genius of infinite sacrifice and monumental industry, and with a mind of extraordinary logical keenness and grasp.‖28 Furthering this call for the adoption of Marxist principles and politics amongst African-Americans, Loren Miller declared that there was ―one way out,‖ for African-Americans in a segregated, minstrelized, capitalist society, clarifying that ―a Negro nation requires a Socialist

American and with that achieved there would be no place for group exploitation.‖29

Dubois summarized these perspectives, concluding that the incorporation of Marxism

―must be modified in the United States of America and especially so far as the Negro group is concerned.‖30 Envisioning Marxism as a liberating political and discursive force,

DuBois and other black public intellectuals cited the need for an acculturation of Marxist philosophy in order to accommodate the specific economic needs and racialized concerns of African-Americans.31

26 Barbara Foley, Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 24. 27 Foley, Spectres of 1919, 82. 28 W.E.B. DuBois, ―Marxism and the Negro Problem,‖ Crisis, May 1933. DuBois adds, ―the Marxian philosophy is a true diagnosis of the situation.‖ 29 Loren Miller, ―One Way Out—Communism,‖ Journal of Negro Life, July 1934, File on Black Response to Communism, 11:1, Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University (New York). 30 DuBois, ―Marxism and the Negro Problem.‖ 31 Building upon the potential premise of these ties and seeking to capitalize on the ―eruption of black militancy in 1919,‖ the CP and various (and often disparate) sects of the 84 Stepping back for a moment, when traditionally analyzing Communism or conceptualizing a Marxist theoretical framework the historical definition addresses the dismantling of capitalism to liberate the masses of the proletariat. Investigating the

Americanized, and in fact, African-American adaptation of this framework, this analysis is immediately racialized to concern itself with the liberation and enlightenment of black

Americans through revolutionary actions.32 In essence, Marxism and Communist activity

party began making its presence known, establishing multiple and racially inclusive political organizations in cities such as New York and Chicago and spreading its Marxist drawn influence amongst African-Americans disgruntled with their economic and political position within American society. Earl Hutchinson cites the emergent political capital of the black northern industrial workforce, which by 1920, ―had increased more than 150 percent, while the percentage of black farmers and sharecroppers had decreased thirty percent.‖ Hutchinson concludes, stating that, ―the decade promised to be one of intense struggle by both blacks and Communists to gain a real foothold in unions and industry.‖ Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Blacks and Reds: Race and Class in Conflict, 1919-1990 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1994), 10. In a message of propaganda put forth by the African Blood Brotherhood—an early conglomerate of radical black CP and SP members and rival organization of the CPUSA—the pamphlet stated, ―whatever interest the capitalist displayed in the Negro was always motivated by considerations of cheap labour power,‖ and concluded that, ―the only effective way to secure better conditions and steady employment in America is to organize the Negro‘s Labour Power as indicated before into labour organizations.‖ The radical process of incorporating racial concerns in the politics of labor represented a significant occurrence in the transmission of Communist ideology in America, certainly on the part of black Marxist thinkers but also amongst the ranks of the party‘s white practitioners. Recognizing the political capital of race through the specific incorporation of racial strategies in Communist discourse signified a process of ideological adaptation that uncovered the logical path for CP organizers who sought African-American inclusion. And through years of grass roots organizing, the racialized Communist message slowly gained notoriety in the aftermath of the Depression as approximately ten thousand African-Americans joined the party by the mid 1930s in hopes of acquiring more political, economic, and social equity and agency—a far cry from its initial support of roughly two dozen in 1927. ―The Communist Review, Programme of African Brotherhood,‖ 451, 453, File on the African Blood Brotherhood, 1:1, Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University (New York).

32 Tracing the origins of the party‘s ties with African-Americans, historians Philip Foner and James Allen comment on ―the party position with respect to Black Americans,‖ citing the era of Marx as ―part of the general process of transition,‖ yet state that ―the party did not have at hand a substantive Marxist theory to cope specifically with the situation of 85 as channeled through the agenda of African-American public intellectuals throughout the

1930s and 1940s was less about dismantling the systematic controls of capitalism. More so, this relationship was about unhinging the lock to wealth—political, social, intellectual, and artistic wealth—and achieving the ideals of American equality by traversing through the oppressive qualities of its proscribed capitalist-based, racially exclusive system.33

Black Americans.‖ However, Foner and Allen also cite Marx‘s Capital, as an example of an emergent, associative discourse between Communism and African-Americans. Marx states, ―labor with a white skin cannot emancipate itself where labor with a black skin is branded,‖ indicating, as Foner and Allen state, ―the importance of the Black franchise‖ to the transmission of Communist ideology to the United States. James S. Allen and Philip S. Foner, American Communism and Black Americans: A Documentary History, 1919-1929 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), vii. 33 The tenets and practices of the CP in the 1930s, stemmed in part from the Socialist Party doctrine concerning fair labor and civic equality that attained power in the 1910s and collapsed by the era of the New Deal. Eventually acculturated on the basis of ideology by its more left leaning party members including black cultural critics ranging from Cyril Briggs, to W.E.B. DuBois and A. Phillip Randolph, a former Socialist political candidate in New York City in 1928, the Socialist Party historically consisted of white and other non-English speaking immigrants disengaged from African-American politics, in spite of public disavowals of lynchings and racial segregation from noted leaders such as Eugene V. Debs, a traditional labor-oriented and left-wing Socialist. Concerning this ethnic exclusivity, Buhle‘s analysis states, ―from an empirical standpoint, the party did not attract the native-born, urban, eastern or Midwestern worker in any significant proportion.‖ Hutchinson, Blacks and Reds, 12. By 1932, an editorial in the Crusader further clarified the ideological as well as racial divisions experienced within the SP as the push for Communism reached its stride. The editorial states: ―I have no faith in the Socialists, for I have dealt with them. Four years ago I worked with them in Maryland. From the day the campaign ended to the next election period, I never saw a Socialist. Socialist represented a group of people who, had they lived in the days of slavery, would have tried to persuade the owners to give up their slaves.‖ With the word ―persuade‖ being the operative term, the perceived inaction and presumed moderate stance of the CP became its undoing on the part of radical Communists and Marxist thinkers. The term ―persuade,‖ however, also denotes the development of discourse concerning race in Marxist political ideology—and regardless of its usage in this article as an ineffectual strategy of radicalism, the term indicates a claim of associative politics that the leftist members of the SP began to formulate for the cause of civil justice. And as the agenda of the SP formally characterized racial hierarchies as indicative of the exploitive nature of American capitalism, the SP, however faint, offered an initial and therefore, viable voice towards the reconstructive social, economic, and political goals of African-Americans in a segregated, minstrelized and capitalist society. ―Editor of Baltimore Afro-American Speaks for Communists,‖ The 86 Going back to the rift between Ellington and Hammond, an impression is left that the political capital and the activist spheres associated with black public intellectuals had already been clearly mapped out by the time of their feud. However, this discursive constellation emerged in a complex process of intellectual and ideological translation. And from the 1910s to the 1930s, black intellectuals, especially in Northern urban centers, translated Communism for the general agenda of black liberation.

Still largely considered the political party of the outsider, the sparsely affiliated CP in its early years of black inclusion suffered from internal divisions, ideological disparities with fellow Communists and Socialists both at home and abroad, and government persecution to eventually surface as a political party concerned with Diasporic revolutionary efforts but also the affairs of the racially mixed American proletariat.34

Communism survived, however, gaining strength initially as an emergent grass roots interracial subculture that endured in communities such as Harlem and Chicago because of its radical focus on race and its unique ability ―to attract blacks who possessed a strong nationalist orientation.‖35 During the 1920s, the CP began to consolidate its constituents,

―having more or less brought together divergent tendencies arising from the different roots of American Communism and having overcome the state of internecine war between

Crusader, November 5, 1932, File on Black Response to Communism, 11:1, Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University (New York). 34 Hutchinson cites the governmental pressure placed upon Communists, stating, ―governmental officials dug deep to make their case that a Communist-led uprising was imminent: ‗The entire program is intended to incite the Negroes to attain by violence the ends specified.‘ The press added a little spice to the sinister dalings when it revealed that the document was smuggled into the country by an ‗authorized Soviet courier…Was any of this true? Historians are divided on it.‖ Hutchinson, Blacks and Reds, 12-14. 35 Naison, Communists In Harlem During The Depression, 4. 87 its…factions.‖36 Foner and Allen cite the efforts of Cyril Briggs, Otto Huiswood, and Otto

Hall as the ―most insistent prodders of the party,‖ vigorously campaigning, ―within the party to raise its consciousness on the ‗Negro Question.‖37 Foner and Allen further posited on the burgeoning political association between Communists and black Americans, commenting that the ―compelling reason for blacks to remain in the party,‖ lied in, ―their conviction that Marxism and the socialist perspective would in time evolve a solution if the party stuck to the revolutionary path.‖38

36 Foner and Allen, American Communism and Black Americans, vii. 37 Foner and Allen, American Communism and Black Americans, ix. 38 Foner and Allen, American Communism and Black Americans, ix. By 1925, groups such as the American Negro Labor Congress assembled in Chicago as an auxiliary of the CP to augment the party‘s efforts to organize black laborers. The mission goals of the ANLC was, ―to bring the Negro working people into the trade unions and the general labor movement with the white workers,‖ as well as to extend its focus towards international and Diasporic affairs that aided in ―the general liberation of the darker races and the working people throughout all countries.‖ The ANLC called for a more racialized focus in the organizational ranks of the CP—however, the organization also specified its terms of garnering agency for African-Americans by centering on the workforce in order to apply that agency towards a broader discussion of class equality. With its rhetoric drawn from the perspective of African-Americans, racial concerns were addressed through the vehicle of class and from this convergence the associative dynamics between Communists and African-Americans became mutually beneficial on a theoretical basis. Commenting on this amalgamation of racial and class politics, the ANLC preamble stated, ―It is a fundamental error to assume that our oppression arises from racial differences. Racial difference simply serves to make more brutal this oppression…To appreciate the true nature of our oppression it is necessary that we understand the class structure of the society in which we live. In capitalist society we distinguish two classes: on class, the workers or proletariat…the first class belong to the vast bulk of Negroes in this country…There is urgent need for a militant mass Negro organization to lead the struggle of the Negro workers. Organized through the premise of racial solidarity, The ANLC propose an acculturation of traditional Communist politics in which the proletariat class is identified by the ―struggle of the Negro workers,‖ in an effort to organize and survive the ―brutal‖ racial oppression experienced in a segregated capitalist environment. Lasting only until 1930 due to a series of ineffective efforts to organize in African-American as well as Afro-Caribbean labor intensive sites, the organization splintered to the National Negro Labor Congress by 1931. ―The A.N.L.C. Preamble,‖ 1-2, File on the American Labor Committee, 5:1, Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University (New York). 88 The CP in its early stages of inclusion within African-American society, however, still represented only a ―marginal phenomenon‖ in the overall landscape of black political, social, and cultural life.39 Still fighting with other popular leftist organizations such as the moderate interracial alliance of the NAACP and the nationalist, all black and perceived imperialist perspective of Marcus Garvey‘s Universal Negro Improvement Association, the

CP of the 1920s found it difficult to maintain its members and to gain a clear voice to adequately and pragmatically address the growing needs, questions, and financial aspirations of African-Americans.40 Amidst the confusion of acculturating Communist politics towards a racialized focus, the African-Blood Brotherhood, a radical Marxist themed organization with strong SP roots established in 1918 and led mostly by West

Indian immigrants in New York City found an influential although brief voice in the organizational ranks of the party. In the wake of the Red Summer race riots, the ABB exemplified the alternative platform that Communist themed politics would come to represent for Black Americans. Centering their cause towards the goal of black civil justice and the total abolishment of Jim Crow segregation, the ABB theorized their platform around the Leninist concept of ―self determination,‖ calling for the creation of an autonomous colored state with a ―government of the Negro, by the Negro, and for the

39 Naison, Communists In Harlem During The Depression, 3. 40 In a scathing review of the NAACP tactics, Eugene Gordon presented the case of radicalism versus moderate activism, stating, ―(The) statement of the NAACP‘s characterizes the attitude of Nice People everywhere; nice, respectable folks who shudder daintily. We must not ‗stir up trouble.‘ Let the ruling class rape and plunder and murder, let it invade workers‘ homes and churches, burning those structures to express its hatred and contempt; let it swagger and bludgeon, let it spit in your face; but for God‘s sake, don‘t raise a hand! Don‘t so much as make a gesture of defending your face from the bully‘s spit! Don‘t! It might ‗stir up trouble.‖ Eugene Gordon, ―Communism vs. NAACP,‖ The Chicago Whip, August 1, 1931, File on Black Response to Communism, 1:11, Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University (New York). 89 Negro.‖41

Further clarifying a racialized stand in Communist politics, Cyril Briggs stated that,

―we must aim to encourage existent divisions and even to foster new divisions in the ranks of the white race.‖42 This publicized radicalism also attracted the attention of governmental authorities as the Military Intelligence Division on Negro Activities targeted the ABB and

Briggs in particular and branded the activist as ―well known radical agitators amongst the

Negroes‖ that ―seem to be capitalizing‖ on racial discord ―for their own particular benefit.‖43 Comprised of newly migrated African-American workers from the South as well as the West Indies, the ABB gained support and notoriety from the inclusion of black intellectuals concerned with the ideology of imperialism and segregated racial policies suffered under the system of capitalism. Although the ABB represented only a small but vocal minority of black Marxist radicals, factions and individuals within the CP further clarified its message of black radicalism, and Communism progressed in the late 1920s and

1930s due to its reorganized commitment toward including African-Americans within its policy and rhetoric. Concerning this rhetoric, Cyril Briggs mentioned in The Crusader that, ―propaganda is everywhere,‖ and that ―the Negro needs to put out propaganda not only on the inside to wake up the masses and mobilize Negro thought in the Liberation

41 Naison, Communists In Harlem During The Depression, 3. 42 Cyril V. Briggs, ―Lessons in Tactics; for the Liberation Movement,‖ The Crusader, 15, File on the African Blood Brotherhood, 1:1, Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University (New York). 43 Cyril V. Briggs, ―Lessons in Tactics; for the Liberation Movement,‖ The Crusader, 15, File on the African Blood Brotherhood, 1:1, Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University (New York). 90 struggle, but on the outside, among the whites as well.‖44 Additionally, in his 1932 pamphlets on ―Negro Liberation,‖ James Allen posited on the African-American ―right to self-determination‖ and the call for African-American intellectuals to adopt a more racially militant perspective within the ethos of Communism. Allen states, ―No longer can the

Negro people, as the Negro misleader W.E.B. DuBois advises, look to the white bourgeoisie as their ally in the struggle for liberation.‖45 Allen further states:

In general, the demand for the right of the oppressed nations to self determination means the right to free political separation from the oppressing nation…the right of self-determination as applied to the Negroes in this country means…(to) have the right to set up a republic of the Black Belt in which the Negroes would exercise governmental authority (and where the significant white minority would have full equal rights with the Negroes), and determine for themselves whether their country should be federated to the United States or have complete political independence.46 Indicative of the nebulous political spirit of the age, black public intellectuals found both allies and adversaries within their own organizations, as well as their associate and rival organizations. Clear lines of ideological division were often drawn, whether between

Garveyite Nationalists and Communists, or amongst the numerous splits between the ranks of Marxist thinkers from the dialectical divisions of Communists and Socialists to the oppositional politics that came into a clearer focus after WWII between Trotskyists,

Stalinists, Leninists, and other sects of new and traditional Marxists. Commenting on the diversity and contradictions of shared ideology amongst Marxist thinkers, historian Cedric

44 Cyril V. Briggs, ―Lessons in Tactics; for the Liberation Movement,‖ The Crusader, 15, File on the African Blood Brotherhood, 1:1, Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University (New York). 45 W. E. B. DuBois, ―The Struggle for Negro Liberation,‖ File on James S. Allen, 1:4, Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University (New York). 46 James S. Allen, ―The Right of Self-Determination,‖ File on James S. Allen, 1:4, Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University (New York). 91 Robinson rationalized that, ―as Marxists they were compelled to juggle contending impulses,‖ and that ―despite their sometimes feverish energies they were essentially contemplative didactics coupled with revolutionary action.‖47 Falling under a broad

Marxian rubric, however, political and ideological overlap was both inevitable and a natural catalyst for the severe fissions within developing and constantly acculturated political ideologies. In tracing the historiography of radical leftist black activism as well as the construction of the modernist black public intellectual there is an acknowledged difficulty by what Nikhil Singh cites as a tendency to overstate ―the importance of both formal Marxist thinking and the concrete organizing efforts of the American Communist

Party.‖48 Suffering from questions over philosophy, practice, and strategy, the tide of

Marxist influenced thought amongst black Americans began its journey in spite of and as a direct result of this nebulous political atmosphere. And this trajectory offered alternative discourse to the racially marginalized and indeed, minstrelized political, economic, and social ideologies of a capitalist America.

By the beginning of the 1930s, the black political positions within the Left increasingly grew apart from the white leftist milieu and its organizations. The fascination with black 'folk' traditions as well as the minstrelized expectations of black authenticity on the Left constrained an independent course of black cultural politics. Marxism was thus central to the debates about black modernity beyond the sphere of music. The development of intellectual cross-currents between white Leftists and black intellectuals and the eventual development of ideological distance have been analyzed in order to arrive at a more

47 Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 280. 48 Singh, Black is a Country, 1. 92 nuanced and comprehensive picture of the discourse in which Hammond and Ellington were eventually able to assume their stances on jazz and politics.

Communism and Black Cultural Media

Through a domestic agenda concerned with labor unions and anti-lynching campaigns, the subject of race became an explored topic of the CP placing the party in concert with the affairs of African-Americans and those concerned with the ―Negro

Problem.‖49 Along with its working class constituents the party also appealed to a large number of African-Americans concerned with international issues as campaigns committed to toppling fascism and colonialism abroad spoke to an array of creative intellectuals concerned with the affairs of the black Diaspora.50 Initially centered on the internationalist,

Stalinist position of Non-Alignment under the direction of the Comintern, the CP with the help of various New York intellectuals and independent reform groups such as the John

Reed Club, the Composer‘s Club, and the Worker‘s Alliance created a more reform- favored and inclusive party that backed the democratic initiatives of the Popular Front and eschewed the Comintern‘s mandate to assemble a ―tightly knit political machine with a

49 Although a common question amongst black public intellectuals, this term gained worldwide prominence with references by Leon Trotsky‘s 1933 interview, ―The Negro Question in America,‖ C.L.R. James‘s 1948 speech, ―The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the U.S.A‖ among others. 50 Robin Kelley, however, cites this trans-national approach as a primary reason for the low number of black constituents in the party, citing that an ―internationalist vision sometimes hindered the Party‘s work in the African-American community.‖ Kelley also states that, ―the Communists‘ failure to mobilize significant black support in the early and mid-1920s can be partially attributed to the Comintern‘s vision of internationalism which extended beyond Pan-Africanism and/or racial solidarity.‖ Kelley, Race Rebels, 107-108. 93 disciplined membership.‖51 By the mid 1930s leaning into the 1940s, the face of this emerging party was uniquely that of New York; an interracial association of artists and thinkers, as diverse as Countee Cullen, Lincoln Steffens, Langston Hughes, and Theodore

Dreiser aligned themselves with the revolutionary practices and Marxist principles of the party.52 Spreading the Communist message through publications such as The Messenger, the New Masses, and The Daily Worker, and alongside the discourse and their individual works, the CP gained steadily in membership and general influence, forcing its ideologies out of seclusion and into the reformatory environment of the Popular Front era. The inclusion of African-Americans in the Communist Party marked a significant moment in the practical employment of Marxist-based theory in the United States.53 As Communists acculturated the philosophical tenets of traditional Marxism to accommodate African-

American inclusion, Communism became a pragmatic political alternative for African-

Americans concerned with revolutionary ideas and direct alternatives to Garveyism and

51 William B. Scott and Peter M. Rutkoff, New York Modern: The Arts and the City (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 198. Scott and Rutkoff further claim that, ―between 1931 and 1935, Communist strategy in Harlem ran counter to national and international strategy,‖ concluding that the New York CP, ―as an open, reform-minded, pragmatic political organization…attracted independent, but radicalized artists and writers.‖ 52 Scott and Rutkoff, New York Modern, 200-205. 53 Earl Hutchinson comments that, ―Despite misgivings about black recruiting, white chauvinism, and Moscow-directed policy shifts, communists were generally satisfied that they had made more friends than enemies among blacks in the Depression‘s early years. Now it was time to raise the stakes. 1932 was an election year. Depression discontent among blacks and whites was so great that it was practically a sure bet that Americans would pick a new president. The big migrations from the South had swelled the ranks of black voters in northern cities. For the first time since Reconstruction, the political arena might offer fresh opportunities for the redress of black grievances.‖ Hutchinson, Blacks and Reds, 81. 94 America‘s segregated democracy.54

The CP continued to gain influence leading into the 1930‘s as Harlem notables such as Cyril Briggs and Richard Moore began to center the ethos of Communism on a more racially focused and radicalized crusade.55 There were still a number of setbacks. In party fighting remained a constant fixture of the grassroots organizations and their compromised ability to stabilize the various sects of the movement. The popularity of Garvey‘s capitalist inspired and ―racially pure‖ nationalist movement also deterred the momentum of

Communism. In an article acerbically titled, ―Communism is Bad for Black People Says

Marcus Garvey,‖ a common critique concerning the ideology and its effects on African-

Americans is offered by the famed black nationalist.56 Garvey states, ―when we take off the mask of Communism in America…what is left is a determined effort to trick the Negro

54 As Communists abroad began considering the ―Negro Question‖ the 4th Congress of the Comintern addressed the struggles of black workers in the face of the ―imperialist exploitation,‖ practiced by the United States. Although not a focal concern, the following Comintern Congress sessions continued to fuse American racialized politics with its Marxist ethos, thus establishing a political foundation for the discussion of racial justice with the rubric of Communist practice and ideology. However, this Congress of the Comintern was not the first that dealt with matters of race and African-Americans. Claude McKay attended the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in 1922 to speak on behalf of African-Americans and against the color-blind political perspective of Communists and Socialists in the U. S. A. and abroad. Additionally, in an article by Gilbert Lewis, Lewis states, ―the Comintern in the thesis of the Sixth World Congress on the Negro question in the U.S.A. declared that a major task of the American party is to utilize the revolutionary traditions of the Negro, to awaken his dormant revolutionary spirit, and win him for the class struggle. That the Negro‘s past is indeed rich in revolutionary tradition is a fact that a glance at any history of the Negro in America will amply demonstrate.‖ Gilbert Lewis, ―Revolutionary Negro Tradition,‖ File on Culture, 1:27, Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University (New York). 55 Co-founders of the African Blood Brotherhood, along with Claude McKay and Wilfrid Domingo. As stated, the ABB was an organization dedicated to black liberation and had direct ties to the Communist party in the early 1920s. It later amalgamated with the CPUSA. 56 ―Communism is Bad for Black People Says Marcus Garvey,‖ Chicago Defender, July 4, 1936, 24. 95 worker as to starve him out of existence.‖57 Stirring distrust of the party as well as the incoming effects of ―the conservative political current,‖ worked to effectively measure the total numbers of activist within the party.58 However, Communism survived as a realistic political alternative as new resolutions to the ―Negro Question‖ were prominently explored through the ideology and political agency through individual affiliations with radical

Communist aligned brotherhoods and societies granted African-Americans a larger stake in the American political arena.59

The questions concerning Communism were debated in historically black publications such as The Chicago Defender. Commenting on the influence of the black press in the early to mid 20th century in her study Race Against Empire, Penny Von Eschen stated that the African-American news outlets were, ―the main vehicle through which public intellectuals spoke to one another and to their main audiences: the black middle classes and working classes, including teachers, ministers, other professionals, and blue collar and domestic workers.‖60 Circulating the topic of Communism became a focus of the Defender in the period just following WW1 and into the Popular Front era. An unsigned Defender column published in 1922 the article comments on the sudden rise of

Communist activity amongst African-Americans stating, ―had the black man of the United

States been as inflammable as the Russian reds… blood would have run freely in many communities, for there would have been a race war.‖61 Citing the growing frustrations of

57 ―Communism is Bad for Black People Says Marcus Garvey,‖ Chicago Defender, July 4, 1936, 24. 58 Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression, 8. 59 Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression, 10. 60 Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism 1937-1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 8. 61 Chicago Defender, December 30, 1922. 96 African-Americans concerning the segregated political and racial climate of the United

States, the article also suggests the notion of African-Americans determining their own political fate through the expression of radical political ideology.

The Defender also analyzed the influence of Communism amongst African-

Americans with a critical perspective investigating the distrust felt over the foreign ideology and in some efforts, casting a shadowy pall over the practice of its politics. In an article published in 1930, Communism is labeled as ―a menace‖ and an impractical solution to the segregated and violent conditions African-Americans faced on a daily basis.62 Other articles, with such sensationalized headings as ―Communists Fail to Help Tenets,‖ and

―Girl Thrown Down Stairs in Red Fight,‖ assisted in stirring the anti-Communist sentiment, labeling its constituents as agitators and detractors to the cause of black social equality.

By 1932, following the trend amongst outwardly political African-Americans, the publication took a more tolerant stance towards Communism and sought out the perspectives of black public intellectuals to extrapolate on the ideological function(s) of

Communism in the struggle for civil rights. Langston Hughes was quoted in the Defender stating that, ―the hysterical fear of Communism displayed by whites is born of the fact that they fear it will awaken the Negro and lead him to take active steps to better his condition.‖63 This article, among others worked to personify members of the party as young, educated, socially aware, and creatively intellectual African-Americans concerned with the general politics presented by the CP concerning the cause of racial justice. Dr.

Carter G. Woodson, a notable political moderate as well as the director of the National

62 ―Investigating Communism,‖ Chicago Defender, August 9, 1930. 97 Association for the Study of Negro Life and History even praised Communist activism in the various urban communities of African-Americans. Woodson states, ―Negroes who are charged with being Communists advocate the stoppage of lynching, the abrogation of laws of disenfranchisement, equality in the employment of labor…If this makes a man a ―Red‖ the world‘s greatest reformers belong to this class and we shall have to condemn our own greatest statesmen, some of whom attained the presidency of the United States.‖64 These statements worked to secure a broader definition of Communism both as a radical ideology and an accessible political vehicle for moderately inclined

Forging an alliance and entering the discursive dimensions of African-American public and political life, Communists began the process of utilizing media outlets to convey the content of their message of progressivism.65 In his analysis of Communist radio outlet

WEVD, Nathan Godfried explores the transmission of the Communist message amidst the process of ―social democratization‖ in the era of the Popular Front.66 Godfried investigates this history by citing the initial philosophical problems encountered by Marxists who branded media outlets as proselytizers of mass culture established to manipulate, restrict, and passify the expressions and actions of the proletariat public. Godfried states, ―By the early years of the Great Depression, corporate-controlled national radio networks,

Hollywood-centered motion picture producers, and large-circulation daily newspapers

63 ―Langston Hughes Extols Communist Party,‖ Chicago Defender, June 25, 1932. 64 ―What‘s Wrong With Being A Communist?‖ Chicago Defender, March 14th 1936. 65 By the mid 1930s, Communist interest in black art becomes a public and party sanctioned matter. As Earl Hutchinson states, ―Communists recognized that since the Democrats and Republicans had virtually written blacks out of American politics, it would be to their advantage to write them back in.‖ Hutchinson, Blacks and Reds, 81. 66 Nathan GodFried, ―Struggling Over Politics and Culture: Organized Labor and Radio Station WEVD During the 1930s,‖ Labor History 42, no. 4 (2001): 348. 98 appeared to dominate the means of ideological and cultural production in the U.S.‖67

Godfried further expresses the doubts of Communists over the use of media claiming that,

―the Socialist Party contended that commercial radio programs were as standardized as anything rolling out of a Ford factory‖ and that ―Labor, progressive, and radical leaders correctly perceived the mass media as an integral part of the larger social and economic relations of production.‖68

Godfried, however, also cites the work of Michael Denning, who pronounced that the societal radicalism of the 1930s and the 1940s was an inevitable force of the ―laboring of American culture‖ in which Americans of all class varieties became integral producers, laborers, and consumers of cultural industry, and thus ―helped to advance the ‗social democratization‘ of national culture and politics.‖69 Through Denning‘s focus, Godfried positions the cultural shift amongst Marxist thinkers as an avenue to create a stake in the production of mass media, utilizing grass roots media and cultural institutions to ―produce labor programming during the 1930s‖ and engage with the use of stations such as WEVD and WCFL out of Chicago a publically Marxist discursive atmosphere through the use of mass media outlets.70 Godfried states that, ―leaders of both WEVD and WCFL hoped to use their outlets to create just such a new social order by educating, organizing, and

67 Nathan GodFried, ―Struggling Over Politics and Culture: Organized Labor and Radio Station WEVD During the 1930s,‖ 348. 68 Nathan GodFried, ―Struggling Over Politics and Culture: Organized Labor and Radio Station WEVD During the 1930s,‖ 348. 69 Nathan GodFried, ―Struggling Over Politics and Culture: Organized Labor and Radio Station WEVD During the 1930s,‖ 347. 70 Nathan GodFried, ―Struggling Over Politics and Culture: Organized Labor and Radio Station WEVD During the 1930s,‖ 348-350. 99 entertaining workers and their communities.‖71 Cited by Denning as a ‖proletarian public sphere,‖ these stations perceived ―their intended audiences not as special interests, but rather as a large public of politically and economically subordinated groups, labor radio advocates fought to protect their rights of these subaltern groups, enhance their members‘ class identity, and increase their social cohesiveness.72 Importantly, this process of reformatting station playlists increasingly standardized Marxist thought towards a diverse population, thus continuing a process of acculturation amongst traditional Marxist thinkers to reconceptualize the philosophy towards a more inclusive audience from a perspective that incorporates the realities of a capitalistic, technologically transformative mass culture.

Not surprisingly, new and diverse music rotations were incorporated to seize upon these recently recognized audiences. In 1932, the New York Amsterdam reported that

George Maynard, the program director of ―Station WEVD‖ was ―ballyhooing in no uncertain terms the fact that the ‗welcome sign‘ is out to all colored artists.‖73 Specifically, jazz became a regular feature of the traditionally classical WEVD broadcast, justifying its rotation under Marxist-oriented terms that declared, ―to split melody into casts, the result is as bad as class legislation.‖74 Furthermore, the hostility initially served through print media

71 Nathan GodFried, ―Struggling Over Politics and Culture: Organized Labor and Radio Station WEVD During the 1930s,‖ 350. 72 Nathan GodFried, ―Struggling. over Politics and Culture: Organized Labor and Radio Station WEVD During the 1930s,‖ 350 73 R. Vincent Ottley, ―Are You Listenin‘?‖ The New York Amsterdam News, August 24, 1932, 7. Additional sources mention the reformatted station playlists of Communist radio, declaring that ―Negroes being featured significantly on all broadcasting chains. See, Ida Mae Ryan, ―Along Radio Lane,‖ The New York Amsterdam News, December 12, 1936, 11. 74 ―Mental Diet Calls For Music,‖ New York Times, August 13, 1933, x7. The article continues to ingratiate it‘s audience towards jazz, stating, ―jazz, for example, may be very classical,‖ and concluding that, ―in fact, jazz may be more classical in structure than much so-called high class music.‖ 100 began to thaw as specific periodicals came to effectively serve Communist goals of developing a functional political and social discourse with African-American constituents.

Capitalizing on the popularity of swing, Communists by the mid to late 1930s promoted a favorable perspective on black musical art in order to parlay a visage of relevance amongst

CP leadership towards its grass roots organizers and potential party members.75 In contention with the prior, and indeed, present day labeling of jazz as ―decadent‖ amongst traditional and European Communists,76 the Daily Worker led the charge in promoting the idea of African-American progressive thought through the expressions of radicalism in jazz music by the late 1930s and early 1940s.77

The Daily Worker highlighted the African-American presence at CP fundraisers

75 In David Stowe‘s analysis, Stowe cites that Communists, ―were eagerly aligning themselves with swing and other forms of black music,‖ and that ―beginning in 1937, the Daily Worker began publishing articles favorable to swing and regularly reviewed jazz records.‖ Stowe, Swing Changes, 64-65. Additionally, Earl Hutchinson in Blacks and Reds states, ―By 1934, Party leaders, probably spurred by pressure from black Communists, had done some reevaluation of black culture. Suddenly, the poems and music the Party had once labeled ‗gutter became acceptable. Many Party members became staunch defenders of black cultural traditions. Communists were ordered to ‗fight against the suppression of Negro culture by the white ruling class.‘ Ads for the Party-sponsored ‗All Negro Recitals‘ and spirituals and African dance shows occasionally ran in the New Masses and Daily Worker. The poetry and plays of Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and other Harlem Renaissance writers were hailed by the Party.‖ Hutchinson, Blacks and Reds, 79-80. 76 Erenberg cites Mike Gold of the Daily Worker, who‘s editorials proclaimed jazz as ―fairly tawdry and cheap,‖ renouncing the references of a proletarian connection, claiming it had ―no roots in anything except the Broadway pavement,‖ lacking both high and folk standards as ―a kind of commercial product, rootless, meaningless, adulterated, ― and ―a source of bourgeois corruption.‖ Erenberg, Swingin‟ the Dream, 132. 77 Stowe continues, stating that ―the party‘s desire to recruit members of oppressed groups such as African-Americans‖ fueled this agenda, citing that the CP‘s prior ―dismissal of vernacular music resulted in a dissonance between the party leadership and its rank-and- file organizers.‖ Stowe concludes, explaining that ―the more tolerant, inclusive atmosphere‖ of Communist and Marxist-oriented public intellectuals envisioned popular music, ―to be seen as an important vehicle, along with black theater, literature, and professional sports, for promoting the idea that African-American culture was integrally American, quintessentially democratic and progressive.‖ Stowe, Swing Changes, 65. 101 with advertisements including a public notice for jazz at the ―Hallowe‘en Eve‖ concert at the Savoy Ballroom, with ―proceeds are going to Party Building Drive.‖78 In addition to the advertisements, the paper set a tone of racial inclusivity with articles such as ―Anti-

Negro Song Boo‘d; Singer Stops; Wins Prize.‖ Establishing a claim for swing‘s social and cultural relevance within the CP, the article swiftly reveals an intolerance of minstrel stereotypes through the account of Roy Laurence, an amateur baritone singer who ―got off to a bad start at the movie house on 125th St. when he tried a chauvinistic little ballad called

‗That‘s Why Darkies Were Born.‖ The article further declared that ―the boos, deep and insistent halted him three times.‖79

A year earlier in an article entitled ―Swing Hi-De-Ho,‖ the subject of jazz is evaluated along similar ideological lines in order to promote the artistic virtue of

―progressive‖ musicianship and to dispel ―all the nonsense that has been written about

‗swing‘ music both by ignorant music critics and fervent dilettantes suggests.‖80 In an attempt to legitimize the art amongst classically inclined readers, the article unabashedly demarcates between ―good and bad orchestras‖ in accordance with its Communist principles, declaring:

Because swing or ―hot‖ jazz cannot be judged from the point of view of ―classical‖ music it is infinitely baffling to one who is unaware of its totally different principles. In terms of ‗swing‘ the jazz field is composed of good and bad orchestras. The bad orchestras are better known; they rarely play real jazz, but exploit the commercial side of popular music. They are

78 ―Anti-Negro Song Boo‘d; Singer Stops; Wins Prize,‖ The Daily Worker, December 2, 1938. In the same issue, an advertisement listed Chick Webb, Ted Hill and the Savoy Sultans for ―Celebrity Night‖ at the Savoy Ballroom under the ―auspices of the friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.‖ The Daily Worker, October 27th, 1937. 79 ―Anti-Negro Song Boo‘d; Singer Stops; Wins Prize,‖ The Daily Worker, December 2, 1938. 80 ―Swing Hi-De-Ho,‖ The Daily Worker, September, 12, 1937, 4. 102 successful because of publicity and the incompetence of critics who are influenced by publicity.81

The article engages in an argument that categorizes the ―good‖ and ―bad‖ of the field according to its ability to represent Marxist principles. Similar to Hammond‘s interpretations of Ellington‘s piece, the article designates the ―good‖ jazz as removed from the mechanations of mainstream and mass culture and representative of proletariat

―principles.‖ The article continues to explore these ―principles‖ of ―good and bad jazz,‖ focusing on the individual artist and their contributions to the discourse of progressive thought, stating:

The real jazz artist does not merely transmit the ready-made music on his stand. His business is to create on the spot, to compose or improvise ever new elaborations or variations upon a given ground melody. This, briefly, is the ‗hot‘ artist‘s uniqueness. ‗Swing‘ is not required by him but is a gift, and although he must be constantly ‗inspired‘ never to play a melody the same way twice, he plays characteristically with the greatest of ease.82

Defining jazz, or ―real jazz‖ along the lines of improvisational acumen indirectly racializes the argument of the article. Careful to place jazz outside of the qualitative category of classical music, the ―uniqueness‖ of ―real jazz‖ is still evaluated within a framework that is racialized as improvisational dexterity characteristic of African-derived music is championed in the discernment of jazz over the regimented practice of composition, indicative of a European, classical tradition.

In an effort to portray black musical ingenuity as progressive, the article specifies the development of jazz improvisation as the characteristic trait of authentic, innovative, and indeed, proletarian art. The article continues, however, by vaulting the qualities of

81 ―Swing Hi-De-Ho,‖ The Daily Worker, September, 12, 1937, 4. 103 ―real jazz‖ back towards a classical categorization—still the standard template for an evaluation of musical merit, stating:

The development of ‗swing‘ took a new, revolutionary turn when the harmonic elements gained increasing prominence. This element, which drew from the impressionist composers as remote—at first sight—as Debussy and Delius, provided coloristic, atmospheric subtlety and sophistication.83

The article concludes by introducing Duke Ellington as a figure representative of the sophisticated qualities of the ―real jazz artist.‖ With a strategy of amalgamation, Ellington musically compliments the ―hot‘ artist‘s uniqueness,‖ while identically complimenting the

―atmospheric sophistication,‖ of the icons of classical music. The article concludes:

Unquestionably at the very peak of the new trend is Duke Ellington. Ellington‘s orchestra is probably the most perfect ‗swing ensemble extant. Its personnel are first rate artists who play as if they are organically inseparable…true, Ellington generally writes out their music, but there is no recognizable loss of spontaneity in their performance.84

In its evaluation of the jazz scene, the Daily Worker clarifies this strategy of amalgamation with the example of Ellington, who serves as an indicator of the political subtext within jazz that is brought into light within a Communist discourse. In a dual effort to attract an audience with popular culture and to parlay the ―revolutionary‖ characteristics of the art and artists to its existing readership, Ellington is positioned in the article as an example of the progressive expression unique ―upon the role of Negro musicians.‖85 However, in his apparent mastery of classical musical signatures and his cross-over appeal, he is also portrayed as a public figure capable of classical, and indeed, white standardization, therefore compromising his ―Negro style‖ towards a palatable format for the more

82 ―Swing Hi-De-Ho,‖ The Daily Worker, September, 12, 1937, 4. 83 ―Swing Hi-De-Ho,‖ The Daily Worker, September, 12, 1937, 4. 84 ―Swing Hi-De-Ho,‖ The Daily Worker, September, 12, 1937, 4. 85 ―Swing Hi-De-Ho,‖ The Daily Worker, September, 12, 1937, 4. 104 traditional guard of musical (and indeed, political) purist.86 This reading of Ellington differs from the sentiment espoused by Hammond who valued the ―authentic‖ aesthetics of traditional black art. However, there is a notable theoretical overlap as Ellington‘s classically inclined qualities are celebrated due to a racialized critique of his artistry.

Regardless of Hammond‘s or the Daily Worker‟s accuracy reading Ellington‘s work, the centrality of racial politics within the analysis subjects Ellington‘s art to an unavoidably minstrelized state.

Recognizing the value of politicized popular art for the transmission of the

Communist message, the Daily Worker published more articles that favorably reviewed jazz. In 1939, an article entitled, ―They‘ll Swing in ‗Swing America,‖ instructed

―comrades‖ to listen for ―that good progressive beat,‖ at the ―Swing America‖ show held at

Madison Square Garden.87 Catering towards the perspective of Hammond and others invested with ―proletarian realism,‖ the Daily Worker claimed that the songs ―have a down to earth Negro theme,‖ stating that ―the kids‖ take on an improvisational cue from jazz,

―inserting their own slogans,‖ and producing lyrics such as, ―gotta make a difference how a black man lives,‘ and the other one a stirring call, ‗ain‘t going‘ to be no lynching; no more,

When I build the heaven that I‘m fighting for!‖88

86 ―Swing Hi-De-Ho,‖ The Daily Worker, September, 12, 1937, 4. 87They‘ll Swing in ‗Swing America,‖ The Daily Worker, May 3, 1939. 88 They‘ll Swing in ‗Swing America,‖ The Daily Worker, May 3, 1939. In the same issue, the Daily Worker also printed a story on the Harlem Cultural Conference which was held to ―consider present-day opportunities for the stimulation of Negro art and culture. The article states, ―the main aims of the Conference, in the light of what the Federal Arts Projects have meant to America generally and to the Negro in particular, will be to arouse community support in maintaining existing facilities for employment of Negroes in the Cultural fields. It will also explore the need for a coordinating body of Harlem citizens and organizations that will interest itself to sustaining and widening cultural horizons for Negro 105 Echoing the content of this article, the Daily Worker by 1943 exposed the work of

Lucky Roberts, an ―original creator of swing music,‖ who proved that ―composers of popular music are fighters too‖ through his endorsement of black Communist representative Benjamin J. Davis for the New York City Council.89 Expounding that musicians are not ―spectators in the fight against Jim Crow‖ or in the fight ―against fascism and Nazism,‖ the article crystallizes the viewpoint of Roberts, stating that ―we are fighting against Hitler racism everywhere in every song we write and will continue to fight until racial discrimination is destroyed.‖90 Conflating ―Hitler racism‖ with U.S. racism, the article articulates a clear politicized content that again, bridges the struggles between domestic and foreign anti-racist agendas. Stating that ―I use the ballad and the ballot,‖ the depth of music‘s political importance is ultimately declared as the jazz ballad (not the bullet) becomes the enfranchising weapon in the struggle for black freedom within the trajectory of Communism.91

Communism, Black Music, and Black Culture

Communism also survived in the 1930s and 1940s because of its incorporation of culture in the proliferation of its message. Historian and cultural critic Harold Cruse posited years later on the inevitable conflation of politics and art within the ―American

Negro point of view.‖92 Harold Cruse cites DuBois‘s speech on the ―Criteria of Negro

men, women, and children as an integral part of the fabric of American life.‖ ―Harlem to Hold Cultural Parley This Week-End,‖ The Daily Worker, May 3, 1939. 89 ―Ballads and Ballots to Fight Jim Crow, The Daily Worker, October 29, 1943, 5. 90 ―Ballads and Ballots to Fight Jim Crow, The Daily Worker, October 29, 1943, 5. 91 ―Ballads and Ballots to Fight Jim Crow, The Daily Worker, October 29, 1943, 5. 92 Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Quill, 1984), 42- 43. 106 Art,‖ in 1926 and refers to DuBois‘s insistence on maintaining a ―functional relationship‖ between black art and politics to benefit the cause of civil justice and the ―American nationality idea.‖93 DuBois states:

People are thinking something like this: ‗How is it that an organization like this, a group of radicals, trying to bring new things into the world, a fighting organization…how is it that an organization of this kind can turn aside to talk about Art? After all, what have we who are slaves and black to do with Art? We who are dark can see America in a way that white Americans can not. And seeing our country thus, are we satisfied with its present goals and ideals?94

With this racialized discursive template, DuBois presents the black artist in an unavoidably political light as an alternative activist in the struggle for social, economic and political equality. Just as black creative intellectuals from the field of literature were involved in

Communist politics, musicians also took note of the party‘s interest in racial equality and lent their services towards a number of fundraisers.

The most notable example was the Communist led legal efforts to overturn the convictions of the ―Scottsboro Nine,‖ a group of black youths arrested in 1931 and charged with the crime of rape. The concerts benefited the ILD (International Labor Defense) defense fund as artists such as Duke Ellington ―gave the services of himself and his orchestra free of charge.‖95 With the inclusion of jazz artists, a public forum was maintained that broadcasted to a wider, interracial audience the CP‘s stated commitment to

93 Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 42-43. 94 W. E. B. DuBois, ―Criteria of Negro Art,‖ Crisis 32, October 1926. 95 ―Ellington in Benefit for Scottsboro Boys,‖ Pittsburgh Courier, October 24th, 1931. Addtionally, Earl Hutchinson notes that, ―jazz musician Duke Ellington was so impressed with the spirit the Reds aroused in Harlem that he agreed to provide entertainment for a Party sponsored-dance at Harlem‘s Rockland Palace in March 1931. More than one thousand black and white activists showed up for the affair. In between dancing to Ellington, they sang the Internationale, watched an interracial dance troupe, and listened to speeches by Party leaders. (William) Foster, basking in the glow of the 107 enacting policies and practices against racial injustice. This commitment fueled the engaging sense of purpose and radicalism circulating the trial and CP sponsored events as

Earl Hutchinson noted the arousing ―spirit of the Reds‖ that influenced Ellington and other musicians to additionally provide entertainment for a series of CP sponsored gigs that year.

Employing a racialized rhetoric to embolden the CP‘s ―real fight‖ against ―the whole brutal system‖ of racist oppression, The CP legitimized its political agenda with the aid of black musicians invested in the cause of black freedom.96

In some cases, associations between Communist activists and black creative public intellectuals came in a more blasé form. Alongside the numerous dances, fundraisers, and concerts, performances at Camp Unity—a Communist holiday center in New York— gained notoriety in the jazz circles for its laissez-faire approach to interracial unity.97

evening‘s revelry, promised to ‗organize Negro workers side by side with white workers.‖ Hutchinson, Blacks and Reds, 70. 96 Daily Worker, January 31st, 1933. In addition, in a March 1933 issue of The Labor Defender, an article entitled, ―Lynchers Prepare Blood Bath in Alabama,‖ the radical discourse of the Scottsboro event was further emphasized by ILD leaders concerned with the trial. The article states, ―the lynch bosses of the south are tightening their forces into a state wide organization, to prepare a blood bath in the Scottsboro case. Every official force in Alabama is mobilized to burn the nine innocent Negro boys went they come up for retrial in March. An organization of ‗vigilance committees; is being perfected for an extra legal lynching in case of an acquittal. Their plans call for the murder, not only of the Scottsboro boys, but of their defenders, the representatives of the ILD.‖ ―Lynchers Prepare Blood Bath in Alabama,‖ File on Anti-Lynching Movement and Activities, 1:6, Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University (New York). 97 Investigating this climate of curiosity, Hutchinson gives detail on the Communist sponsored environments where this discourse was advocated. Hutchinson states, ―—―At Party forums and lectures, Communists lionized Frederick Douglass, Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, and African history. At Party gatherings in Harlem and on Chicago‘s southside, black Communists were more likely to discourse on Duke Ellington or Joe Louis than on Marx or the Communist Manifesto.‖ Hutchinson adds that, —―Black writers like Countee Cullen and Alain Locke liked the Party‘s new attitude. In 1936 Cullen endorsed Party electoral and anti-lynching campaigns. Locke proclaimed the triumph of ‗social realism‘ and ‗proletarian expression‘ in art. Locke suggested that America should emulate the 108 David Stowe‘s analysis of the event cites that the musicians who attended were all ―struck by the extent of interracial dating,‖ that occurred at the retreats.98 Stowe points to Dizzy

Gillespie‘s personal interpretation of the event, with the artist recalling that ―they were trying to prove how equalitarian they were by throwing together the white or the black counterparts of the opposite sex.‖99 Gillespie‘s comments indicate his being ―hip to

Communism,‖ while labeling the event as part of a larger ―game‖ that ―seemed to be to make blacks embrace their philosophy.‖100 On one hand Gillespie, like others, embraced the perks, stating that to become ―a card-carrying Communist‖ was ―directly associated with my work.‖101 On the other hand, Gillespie‘s analysis indicates his mistrust of the CP, similar to Ellington‘s eventual critique of the party‘s ―warped politics,‖ over the unorthodox techniques employed by Communists to gain black constituents, particularly black creative public intellectuals in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The Camp Unity atmosphere mirrored the interracial nightlife celebrated overseas (Paris, in particular) as

African-American musicians such as Gillespie began to reflect on their status as American citizens and question their place within a segregated, minstrelized society.

Café Society also provided a non-segregated refuge under a broadly Communist banner. A club in Greenwich Village and ―the place where stars are made and sold,‖ Café

Society became a popular hotspot for musicians, activists, and those casually and seriously

cultural program for minorities ‗brilliantly developed‘ in the Soviet Union.‖ Hutchinson, Blacks and Reds, 80. 98 Stowe, Swing Changes, 66. 99 Stowe, Swing Changes, 66. Additionally, Shipton‘s Groovin‟ High, offers more of Gillespie‘s observations, citing, ―almost everybody up there was mixed. Whit-black relationships were very close among Communists…a lot of white girls were there, oh yes.‖ Alyn Shipton, Groovin' High: The Life of Dizzy Gillespie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 44. 100 Stowe, Swing Changes, 66. 109 engaged in leftist politics.102 The previous examples have evidenced the attempts of the CP to advocate its political agenda through jazz.103 Identifying the club as a communal space of Marxist discourse, an analysis of Café Society brings forth a challenge to debates and perceptions concerning the distinctions between the cultural politics of artists as ―agents of cultural resistance‖ and the formal activists of organized traditional politics involved with campaigns, unions, and ―commit acts of civil disobedience.‖104 In David Stowe‘s interpretation of the radical climate and politics of Café Society, Stowe‘s intervention lies not between the distinctions of these separate, yet at times, overlapping political

101 Stowe, Swing Changes, 66. 102 ―Café Society: Must Now Be Called the Place Where Stars are Made and Sold,‖ Chicago Defender, January 11, 1941, 20. 103 Additionally, in ―Dance and the Workers‘ Struggle,‖ Stacey Prickett provides detailed examples of the explicit connections and associations of Marxist philosophy and artistic endeavors. Pricket notes that, ――Artists and intellectuals were among those who embraced various versions of Marxism during the inter-war period, as a tool for understanding and changing society. The working class, the proletariat, held the hope for a better future. Following the example set by actors, painters, musicians and writers, young dancers soon took the stage to the strains of the socialist anthem, the Internationale. A new movement began, one of dance for and by the worker. The blend of Marxist ideology and dance spread as the Workers‘ Dance League was founded in 1932.‖ Prickett also provides a detailed perspective concerning the data found in the various spaces. Prickett states that, ―Much of the early work was agit-prop (agitation-propaganda) material which presented political and social problems and potential solutions. The themes were specific to the proletariat and presented in clear, highly accessible forms…Precedents for linking Marxism and dance appeared in America as early as 1924…dance programs, sponsorship, etc…symbolized the harmony and unity that could be achieved in a Marxist society.‖ Prickett lists The Workers‘ Dance League, the Dance Unit, the Needle Trades Industrial Workers Union Dance Group, the Furriers Dance Group , the Harlem Dance Group, and the New Dance Group (supported by the Workers Laboratory Theater) which put out calls for dancers and artists in March 1933 concluding, ―in this period of tremendous historical importance, we call upon all dancers to watch the march of events and make the dance a means of social protest, a revolutionary expression of the workers.‖ Prickett continues, stating that ―the belief that capitalism as a system had failed, fuelled the radicals‘ optimism in the midst of the Depression.‖ Stacey Prickett, ―Dance and the Workers' Struggle,‖ Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 8, No. 1 (Spring 1990): 47-54. 104 David Stowe, ―The Politics of Café Society,‖ The Journal of American History 84, No. 4. (March 1998): 1385. 110 strategies—rather, in the ―different types of cultural politics‖ that worked to intentionally or unconsciously legitimate ―political activity,‖ thus determining Café Society as a site where

―music, murals, or comedy functioned as the vehicle for political expression.‖105 Through an analysis of political intentionality, Stowe‘s illustration of Café Society situates the New

York City nightclub as a domain of the flourishing left, and the primary, ―known hangout(s) for Communist ‗intellectuals,‖ under the Hoover administration of the F.B.I.106

Amidst this environment of ―liberal thinking people,‖ Stowe‘s analysis also brings into focus the racialized climate of this radicalized sphere and the minstrelized setting that existed as a result of its politics.107 Citing the performances of Lena Horne as a case study,

Stowe states that, ―middle class African American‖ performer such as Horne would actually complicate the attempts of owner Barney Josephson ―to break down racial barriers.‖108 Calling for ―Horne and others performers to ‗black up,‘ culturally if not in terms of grease paint,‖ Josephson relied on racializing the artists to convey a sense of authentic, folk-oriented, racial merit in order to ―put authentic blackness and middle class values at odds with one another.‖ Stowe concludes that this ―impulse to see a tension between racial authenticity and bourgeois background affected other members of the Left jazz community,‖ engaging in politics where ―authentic‖ blackness is both exalted and

105 David Stowe, ―The Politics of Café Society,‖ 1385. Additionally, Earl Hutchinson comments on this forging dynamic between Communists and black artists, stating that, ―The records of Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, and W.C. Handy were on the must-listen-to-list of white communists. The party encouraged black members with musical talent to join the Liberator Chorus, which performed a repertoire of spirituals, classical, and blues-oriented songs at Party-sponsored socials and community events.‖ Hutchinson, Blacks and Reds, 80. 106 Stowe, Swing Changes, 67 107 David Stowe, ―The Politics of Café Society,‖ 1389. 108 David Stowe, ―The Politics of Café Society,‖ 1392. 111 pitied in order to counter the perceived minstrelized trappings of segregated society.109

Stowe‘s analysis correctly cites this practice of ―conflating class and race‖ as indicative of the inelegant politics of the radical left, schematically employing displays of racialized identity to convey to one another a process of debunking racist stereotypes.110 However, in the creation of these Marxist centered jazz spheres, a milieu of minstrelsy is actually maintained through the efforts of promoting black artistic and cultural virtue. And although a counter-minstrel narrative, as described in chapter 1, is sonically crafted as jazz employed the ideals of Marxism, the practice of Marxist politics presents, in these cases, a converse narrative as fractured racial stereotypes are unavoidably employed to convey its seemingly progressive politics.

Conclusion

The vehicle of black music had an underdeveloped yet historically noted association with the discourse concerning Communist politics. In an article by Richard

Frank in the New Masses, Frank broadly states that, ―one of the greatest forward strides in the development of the American revolutionary movement has been the policy of the

Communist Party upon the Negro question,‖ eventually specifying that through the advancements of ―cultural media‖ these strides had gained a viable audience in American culture.111 Generally concerned with the transmission of Communist ideology, Frank‘s article focuses on the musical representations of radical expression from radical spheres,

109 David Stowe, ―The Politics of Café Society,‖ 1392-1393. 110 David Stowe, ―The Politics of Café Society,‖ 1392. 111 Richard Frank, ―Negro Revolutionary Music,‖ New Masses, May 15, 1934, 24, File on New Masses, 2:24, Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University (New York). 112 whereas ―native Negro music‖ functions as a mouthpiece for the concerns, agenda, and ideology of the proletariat masses. Frank states, ―in the south, the ideology of the international working class movement is beginning to be expressed in native Negro music.‖112 Furthering this comment, Frank states that, ―the importance of this cannot be overemphasized.‖ 113 This importance foreshadows a grander role for black music, alternatively functioning as the discursive language that bridges and binds a collective sphere concerned with the tenets of social, economic, political and ultimately, racial equality. Frank concludes:

The emergence of the music means that Marxism-Leninism is being expressed in native cultural media, for if the Negroes of America do not form a basic section of the native masses of American, there are no such unions. Furthermore, Negro culture has this peculiarity. While it is the expression of an oppressed people, it still possesses such virility it has an irresistible attraction even for working class whites, who even while they brutally oppress the Negro people are fascinated by Negro music and Negro dancing. How much greater than is the influence of this music upon the white workers whose condition society is similar to that of the negro workers!114

Citing art as ―a weapon,‖ Cyril Briggs also promoted the creation, discernment, and literal usage of black art as a rallying tool of the proletariat. Referring to ―the contribution of Negro artists,‖ Briggs advocated the ―proletarian content‖ of ―genuine Negro culture,‖ falling in line with the Marxist ideals promoted in Dubois‘s template for the black artist.

Briggs states:

112 Richard Frank, ―Negro Revolutionary Music,‖ New Masses, May 15, 1934, 24, File on New Masses, 2:24, Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University (New York). 113 Richard Frank, ―Negro Revolutionary Music,‖ New Masses, May 15, 1934, 24, File on New Masses, 2:24, Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University (New York). 114 Richard Frank, ―Negro Revolutionary Music,‖ New Masses, May 15, 1934, 24, File on New Masses, 2:24, Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University (New York). 113 The contribution of Negro artists…shows further that they are becoming conscious of the class forces in struggle, that they recognize in the CP a weapon in the struggle against national and social oppression, if not yet a recognition of the CP as the leader and organizer of the growing revolt of all oppressed classes and peoples against the common enemy….The promotion of genuine Negro culture, with its proletarian content (work songs, songs of revolt,etc) as against the prostitution of Negro culture to suit the commercial aims and the ―Negro Inferiority‖ dictum of the white ruling class. They are helping to combat the cultural disarming of the Negro people by the white ruling class…of confining Negro art to the limits of black face buffoonery. These negro artists have taken up their historic task.115

In a 1932 column concerning the ―Negro in the Communist party‖ the article states that, ―the American white man, with his superiority complex is unconsciously instilling radical ideas into the minds of Negroes.‖116 Radicalism therefore, in the shape of social and political reform as well as the creative endeavors of black public intellectuals becomes a justified response to the racist trappings of American culture. With this concept in mind, a practice of ideological acculturation within music was utilized by a number of composers and particularly those within the neoclassical tradition of the 1930s to incorporate an increasingly radical narrative to music. Author‘s Scott and Rutkoff research years later pinpoints a strong historical association between Marxist ideals, Communist politics and musical expression. Scott and Rutkoff note the ―Marxist vocabulary‖ provided by students of German ―proletarian‖ composer Hans Eisler who worked with the Composer‘s

Collective of New York to reject the formalism of neoclassical music in favor of compositions that embraced an enlightened ―social and political purpose.‖117 In line with the politics of Communism, Marc Blitzstein‘s music also embodied his allegiance to proletariat sensibilities, associating a strong Marxist thematic format to ―compose the kind

115 Cyril Briggs, ―Art is a Weapon,‖ File on New Masses, 2:24, Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University (New York). 116 ―America‘s Chance,‖ Chicago Defender, July 30, 1932. 114 of music that would transform the velvet sweetness of Die Dreigros (musical piece) into political steel.‖118 On the surface, the regal quality and formalized functions of Ellington‘s work is ideologically converse to the ethos behind Blitzstein‘s Marxist infused music. Yet although Ellington‘s work embraces a formalized quality, his music expresses a similar ideal to those presented by Blitzstein and Communist thinkers alike as Ellington redirects formalism to represent the expressionistic desires of African-Americans—all for the sake of granting greater ―social and political purpose,‖ and encapsulating a wider avenue for the black proletariat intellectual and artistic agenda. Thus, given the racist parameters and minstrelized surroundings placed upon African-American artists, as well as the heavily resuscitated format of Tin Pan Alley which routinely churned out ―authentic‖ black music, the most soluble method to achieve this greater ―purpose‖ was through an augmented sense of formalism. In short, Ellington fused radical ideals with formalism to create politically relevant, high art for the masses of the African-American proletariat. Unburdened by the specifics of politics, Ellington‘s works by the mid 1930s and into the 1940s begin to represent the process in which ―radical ideas‖ were placed ―into the minds of Negroes‖ as his progressive artistry provides the narrative history of jazz‘s increasingly political trajectory.119

117 Scott and Rutkoff, New York Modern, 220. 118 Scott and Rutkoff, New York Modern, 220. 119 By 1943, Duke Ellington‘s composition Black, Brown, and Beige premiered in front of a standing room only, racially mixed audience at the famed Carnegie Hall. Equipped with a 39-page booklet about the mythical, 300 year journey of an African named ―Boola,‖ the audience was exposed to the musically transposed social history of the African-American, from its ancestral roots in Africa, to the cultural and social contributions of the African Diaspora, to the present day, post-Depression, WWII era black-American. Ellington established the piece as a ―tone parallel to the history of the American Negro,‖ and approached the work as cultural history, emphasizing the role of heritage as a central factor in the understanding and interpretation of black identity. Borrowing from his days in 115 the Cotton Club, Ellington‘s stage presentation made few changes from his jungle approach in terms of pure theatrics. However as evidenced by the operatic content as well as the piece‘s focus on developing continuum characteristics around a central character, his music completed its transition towards a style relatively free of racialized constraint. In his autobiography, Ellington discusses this transitional phase of his music. He states, ―The show was done on a highly intellectual level—no crying, no moaning, but entertaining, and with social demands as a potent spice. Anyone who attended those backstage meetings for twelve weeks got a full college education in social significance.‖ Ellington, Music is My Mistress, 176. Harvey Cohen‘s analysis states that the piece and premiere exemplified, ―Ellington‘s lifelong efforts to advance the politics of race through music, lifestyle and image, but rarely words.‖ Cohen continues on this transition, stating that Ellington, ―did this by carefully cultivating an image of respectability and ‗genius‘ in his music, advertisements, shows, and film appearances,‖ concluding that, ―Ellington did not fight for civil rights in the manner of political activists, but he contributed much to that cause, most of it unrecognized because it did not fall within traditional forms of racial protest.‖ Harvey Cohen, ―Duke Ellington and Black, Brown, and Beige: The Composer as Historian at Carnegie Hall.‖ AQ 56, no. 4 (December 2004): 1004-1005. 116 Chapter 3: “The Secret Weapon is a Long Blue Note;” The Foreign Stage, Transnational Influence, and the Counter-Minstrel Identity of Jazz in the Cold War

In late 1955, Felix Belair Jr. wrote an article for the New York Times detailing the current foreign policy measures of the United States government and its latest attempts to spread the ideology of capitalism and democracy across the globe. Belair notes that in the continual endeavor to advance U.S. social and economic policy, the nation had acquired a

―secret weapon in a minor key.‖1 Armed with a trumpet in hand and a swing orchestra behind him, the sonic weapon was jazz and its 56-year-old soldier was the long-standing icon of twentieth century popular music—Louis ―Satchmo‖ Armstrong.

Belair‘s article came at the eve of a landmark musical tour in which several jazz musicians, under the auspices of the U.S. State Department, were chosen to embark on separate six-week gigs of Europe, Asia, Northern Africa, and the Middle East as part of the

―Goodwill Tours Jazz Ambassador‖ program.2 Billed as ―cultural ambassadors,‖ and touring alongside a variety of world renowned performers from other artistic disciplines, jazz musicians took the center rostrum as representatives of American diplomacy and democratic ideals on the foreign stage. In practice, however, the tours presented little that was new to much of the foreign public, as jazz musicians had worked to increase their

1 Felix Belair, Jr., ―United States has Secret Sonic Weapon—Jazz,‖ New York Times, November 6, 1955, 12. 2 The tour schedule also included the Soviet Union as part of a strategy of goodwill diplomacy. Jazz had entered the international public sphere also as an olive branch to Russia, as Benny Goodman served under the VOA ―to broadcast America‘s best dance music to the USSR.‖ Penny Von Eschen also notes that, ―the idea of promoting jazz musicians as cultural ambassadors was the brainchild of an alliance of musicians, civil rights proponents, and cultural entrepreneurs and critics.‖ Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 5- 6. 117 worldwide audience for decades prior to the tours.3 Routinely clamoring for African-

American based art, European fans had established a viable foreign market for jazz music and revered its predominantly black musicians as vanguard artisans of the highest caliber.4

Performing abroad regularly and eventually making his home in Paris and Copenhagen, tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon, who initially cut his teeth with Lionel Hampton‘s and

Billy Eckstine‘s big bands and later as a accompanist of Charlie Parker was among the many renowned black artists of the period who found life and the expression of his art less confining overseas due to the absence of Jim Crow segregation and the specifically minstrelized rubric of American society.5 Armstrong was another jazz artist who routinely

3 Jerome Harris states, ―jazz had entered Germany at the end of World War I and received a boost by the postwar dance craze. Visiting American and British players and bands helped spark interest in the new music; recordings became an additional factor during the 1920s, as gramophones improved in quality and numbers, and domestic and imported records were actively shared and traded among fans—an activity that would gradually be driven underground by the rise of the Third Reich.‖ Specifically, Harris also provides information on the radio broadcasts of jazz artists such as King Oliver‘s Creole Jazz band and the ―radio mania‖ that ―swept the nation‖ by the 1930s. Internationally, Harris cites the technological advances of pirate stations such as Radio Luxembourg, Radio Normandie, Radio Toulouse, Radio Fecamp and Radio Athlone that expanded the audience of jazz in the international public. Jerome Harris, ―Jazz on the Global Stage,‖ in African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective, edited by Ingrid Monson (New York: Routledge, 2003), 109-111. 4 A number of scholars posit on the phenomena of African-American jazz in the foreign market. Burns and Ward reflect on the Belgian author Robert Goffin‘s trip to London to see Louis Armstrong in the 1930s, who cites the ―full-blooded Negro‖ qualities of the entertainer and further claims that ―I know of no white musician who is able to forget himself, to create his own atmosphere, and to whip himself up into a state of complete frenzy.‖ Burns and Ward, Jazz; A History of America‟s Music, 199-200. 5 Uta Poiger, however, cites the measures taken by foreign governments to quell the interest in jazz amongst overseas youth. Poiger cites the attackers from the Stalinist Soviet Union, who under the 1928 article by Maxim Gorky entitled, ―The Music of the Gross,‖ ―associated the music with unbridled sexuality, homosexuality, degeneracy, and bourgeois decadence.‖ Uta Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 22. Burns and Ward also cite the earlier efforts of the Nazi party, banning ―Nigger-Jew‖ music, holding national contests for the purpose of finding a ―suitably Aryan substitute for jazz that 118 toured internationally, having lived in Paris for a year in 1934 and toured various parts of the globe including Japan, Australia, and South America by the mid-fifties, establishing a worldwide fan base and circumventing the racist social, political, economic, and artistic barriers at home in the states.6 By 1955, America‘s ―secret weapon‖ was no secret to the world, with jazz working independently to secure its place on the foreign stage, establishing a functional international sphere for the music and its artists to flourish.

The foreign stage was conceptualized by a variety of artists as a de-minstrelized space and a model public forum for musicians to display their art.7 Seeking a space with relative freedom from the entanglements and oppressive complexities of racialized segregation, black creative intellectuals from a number of artistic genres became enticed with the ideal behind this conceptualization of the foreign stage—a stage seemingly distant from the debilitating surroundings of minstrelsy and exclusively attended by an enthusiastic, intellectual, and fawning public. Drummer Kenny Clarke observed that black musicians in general were ―committing suicide in the United States,‖ and advocated on behalf of the perceived merits of the international sphere by moralizing Europe‘s reputation

eschewed improvisation and further labeled jazz as ―bacillus.‖ Burns and Ward, Jazz; A History of America‟s Music, 216. 6 Poiger‘s work also cites the ultimate futility of the attempts of foreign governments to repress jazz and jazz inspired culture, citing that, ―one of the first riots took place during a Hamburg concert by jazz musician Louis Armstrong in October 1955, when adolescents aired their dissatisfaction with the brevity of the concert and the cancellation of a second one.‖ Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels 79. 7 Harris‘s analysis ponders the global stage‘s potential as a social and political communal sphere, and quotes bell hooks who stated that ―the transnational existence of jazz may, in fact, be evidence that ‗many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of a sense of grounding even if it is not informed by shared circumstance.‖ Harris posits, however, that ―the movement of jazz onto the global stage is a trend that may be judged to hold some dangers,‖ in the form of posing a direct ―threat to those who view jazz as an exclusively African American art form.‖ Jerome Harris, ―Jazz on the Global Stage,‖ 122-123. 119 for racial tolerance and artistic appreciation. Clarke continued, explaining that jazz ―was teaching them (the audience)… (that) there was a message in our music.‖ 8 The foreign stage revitalized the artistic, intellectual, and cultural progression of the music and its

African-American artists who chose to perform their work overseas. In 1951, the Chicago

Defender cited Josephine Baker‘s declarations that ―Europe offers tremendous opportunities for Negro entertainers at this time.‖9 Baker further clarified that ―a large number of colored artists have found sympathetic audiences in France and an appreciation for their talents that they did not get anywhere else.‖10 Granting black musical art the ability to expand past the minstrelized constraints of its nationalistic borders, the foreign stage permitted African-American musicians the opportunity to embody the lasting qualities of Locke‘s New Negro aesthetic as applied to the cosmopolitan ideals of jazz that

Locke hoped would symbolize ―America‘s outstanding contribution…to world music.‖11

This international character ascribed to jazz was also crucial to the art form‘s receptive association with ideological influence, as international causes emerging from Post-

Colonial, Marxist, and Pan-Africanist dialogues often worked in league or in reference with jazz—fostering an art and intellectual discourse that conjointly reflected the diverse concerns of social and political liberty from people of color, both domestically and abroad during the initial stages of the Cold War era.12

8 Scott and Rutkoff, New York Modern, 277. 9 ―Europe is Place for talented Negro Artists, Jo Baker Says,‖ Chicago Defender, June 30, 1951, 22. 10 ―Europe is Place for talented Negro Artists, Jo Baker Says,‖ Chicago Defender, June 30, 1951, 22. 11 Scott and Rutkoff, New York Modern, 140. 12 Ingrid Monson comments on this association historically, stating, ―from the Pan- Africanism of W. E. B. DuBois to the black nationalism (and internationalism) of Marcus Garvey…African American leaders have consistently looked beyond America‘s borders for 120 The libratory interpretation of the foreign stage and the development of the international character of jazz came in response to the minstrelized constraints indicative of

American culture and specifically the broadened milieu of minstrelsy experienced by

African-Americans during the Cold War. Indeed, the jazz stage had historically provided the potential of an enclosed haven relatively free from minstrelized constraint where black and interracial groups could exercise their art with ―very little racist feeling.‖13 However, the artistic and personal freedoms experienced onstage were often short-lived—regardless of whether the venue was in the North or South, at a segregated theatre or even at clubs known for their racially inclusive atmosphere. Commenting on the physical dangers presented from the fractured discourse of American race relations, Dizzy Gillespie remarked that he ―used to carry a carpenter knife‖ after gigs for a fear that ―once you left

52nd Street…look out.‖14 Referencing the physical harassments made by police and neighboring whites angered by the open displays of integration, Gillespie‘s comments illustrate the potentially dangerous complexities concerning race, community, and the expression of art on the domestic stage that culminated in the years leading towards and just after the Second World War. Although existing as a productive space for the

solutions to domestic racism.‖ Ingrid Monson, ―Art Blakey‘s African Diaspora,‖ in African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective, edited by Ingrid Monson (New York: Routledge, 2003), 330. 13 Erenberg cites the ―radical currents of Harlem‖ that re-emerged in the 1940s that attributed to this progressive sentiment of racial unity. Further stating that, ―some musicians joined the Communist party,‖ Erenberg posits that this advanced feeling of equality was a direct result of the political maneuvers and augmented sense of the ―social order‖ amongst musicians, who, as Miles Davis recalled were figuratively, ―trying to get our Master‘s degrees and Ph.D.‘s from Minton‘s University of Bebop.‖ Erenberg, Swingin‟ the Dream, 226-227. 14 Erenberg, Swingin‟ the Dream, 226. 121 integrationist subsets of the jazz community, the domestic stage, still, conversely existed as a site of potential and actualized racial altercation.

By the late 1940s, jazz, its musicians, and corresponding communities were increasingly labeled as part of a subversive, counter-culture element, evidenced particularly as the threat of violence and legal persecution became publically synonymous to its environment. As these experiences became a matter of public record through media exposure and governmental campaigns, the milieu of minstrelsy by the 1950s reconfigured to include these outside, non-musical forces that also worked to challenge the production and expression of African-American art based upon fundamental characterizations of

African-American artists (and white purveyors of black art) as subversive threats to white mainstream culture. In the prior chapters, minstrelsy was defined systematically, existing predominantly as an ingrained and encompassing specter that racialized the terms in which the artistry and intellectual expressions of African-Americans were discerned by the public.

By the mid-century, minstrelsy also existed as a conspicuous socio-political structure that engaged black art as a mechanism of the state and curtailed the production and articulation of African-American creative and intellectual expression.15 Tracing jazz‘s transition from

15 This theoretical lens is best interpreted through the framework established by Marxist-thinker Louis Althusser, specifically interpreting my use of ―mechanism‖ as a theoretical viewpoint in reference to Althusser‘s ―Ideological State Apparatuses.‖ Through an Althusserian framework, the structural ideology presented in minstrelsy turns African- Americans into subjects within the system. And through his theory of ―interpolation,‖ minstrelsy interpolates, ―names,‖ or ―hails‖ both the cultural producers (black creative intellectuals) and audiences into its racist system. In essence, following an Althusserian framework, African-Americans are interpolated into this system of minstrelsy, even as some are resisting it. And the ―Ideological State Apparatuses,‖ represented through institutional forms and societal organizations relegate individuals to subjects. Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm (accessed, January 1, 2009). 122 swing to bop, jazz‘s influence reached worldwide proportions on the strength of its distinctive talents, as individual, vocal, and iconic artists with growing youth appeal constituted the emergent branch of African-American creative intellectuals. But by the mid-century, the milieu of minstrelsy existed beyond its immediately identifiable definitions of racial bias and pejorative stereotype, adapting itself structurally through conservative legal means to accommodate and propel to the stifling socio-political environment of McCarthyism and its efforts to control and confine the radical intellectual expression of black artists.

The strength of this minstrelized societal system, however, was complicated by the challenges presented by the advent of the post-war climate, as African-American public intellectuals began to broadly form as Lewis Erenberg notes ―a new community of avant- gardists rebelling against musical conventions, racism, and the limitations of an organized and routinized world.‖16 At the conclusion WWII, the continuous process of government sanctioned racism and the wide disregard of African-American contributions to the domestic and foreign public amplified the determination of black public intellectuals to publically expose the contradictions and injustices of racial relations in American society through rhetoric, policy, and artistic culture. Evidencing the artistic, social and political resolve of this community, Erenberg cites the perspective of Dizzy Gillespie who emerged from the post-war climate rejecting ―racism, poverty or economic exploitation‖ and refusing to ―live out uncreative humdrum lives merely for the sake of our survival.‖17

Dexter Gordon also commented on this viable public, stating ―it was a time of change and the music was reflecting this. And we were putting our voice into what we thought was

16 Erenberg, Swingin‟ the Dream, 227. 123 about to be the thing.‖18 The augmented resolve of this community strengthened as the ideal of the foreign stage became a non-minstrelized venue and salving refuge for the overall survival of both the art and its artists. 19

Peculiarly, the Goodwill Tours presented a conflicting ideological paradox to the formation of this foreign-inspired artistic and socially progressive milieu. As the creative, seemingly non-minstrelized, international stage came to being, the foreign stage became entangled with and predicated upon the thematic principles of American nationalist Cold

War policy—a government sponsored policy that worked to discount and disregard the racist realities of Jim Crow segregation while specifically working to defeat the influence of Communist politics and Marxist inspired thought at home and abroad. As the cultural ambassadors engaged in their tours—many with tangible ties or indirect connections with

Communist activity—the paradox culminated with an enormously complex condition concerning the proscribed role of jazz as a defining symbol of American social and political freedom and cultural ingenuity. In her detailed analysis of the Goodwill Tours, Penny Von

Eschen describes part of this complex condition, noting the ―primary contradiction‖ of the tours by locating the tangible irony of sending the very citizens affected by the racist

17 Erenberg, Swingin‟ the Dream, 226. 18 Erenberg, Swingin‟ the Dream, 225. 19 Erenberg cites many of these examples concerning ―the failure of swing‘s ecstatic promise of a modern America rooted in pluralism and individualism.‖ Noting the role of bop in creating a ―racial and generational revolt for the postwar world,‖ Erenberg comments on the perspectives of major bop architects such as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Lester Young, and their role in ―evidenc(ing) that criticism.‖ Citing Gillespie, ―I saw a lot of stories about how they wouldn‘t respect a black U.S. soldier down South…he had to go in the ‗colored entrance and everything, and he‘s out there dying for his country. It was awful.‖ Commenting on Lester Young‘s perspective, Erenberg further cites a friend of Young‘s stating that, ―A feeling of revenge lingered in him for years,‖ due to ―the injustice and inhumanity under which Negroes in the South lived.‖ Erenberg, Swingin‟ the Dream, 225. 124 realities of Jim Crow segregation to inexplicably preach the values and virtues of American

Democracy to a foreign audience.20

Von Eschen‘s description remains a useful argument. Yet, it also leaves space for another distinct irony concerning the Goodwill Tours and the government sponsored efforts to transnationalize jazz. In addition to the reality of race within the intellectual framework of this ―primary contradiction,‖ the reality of sending Marxist influenced art and artists to fight Communism remains an evident paradox of strategy. The process of transnationalizing jazz locates this irony as symptomatic of its very method. On the one hand, the tours represented the governmental efforts to control and contain Communist radical thinking at home and abroad by placing ideological controls on African-American public creative intellectuals, the presumed ―Third World‖ people of color abroad and the overall radical and potentially ―subversive‖ content of jazz by applying a democratic, culturally egalitarian and ultimately Americanized face on jazz music. On the other hand, the Marxist contradiction of the tours was symptomatic of the broader efforts of jazz to internationalize its own field—to broaden its borders past its minstrelized surroundings and segregated settings towards the transnational and ideologically infusing environment of the foreign stage. And as the details of this chapter unfold, the Marxist underpinnings found within the discourse of this foreign stage will be uncovered. With the government latching onto the international appeal of jazz as a new form of political strategy, and jazz musicians utilizing the government to bankroll their art, the disparate ideological factions worked together and in response to one another, to foster the still burgeoning transnational appeal

20 Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 4. Von Eschen adds in RAE that 125 of jazz music. And it is the function of this chapter to unpack the complexity of this process by arguing that the government sponsored procedure of transnationalizing jazz, specifically within the politically tumultuous anti-Communist climate of the mid to late

1940s and 1950s, was an inevitable result of the artistically stifling and intellectually suffocating environment fostered by the American government in its treatment and discernment of jazz and African-American art.

In the sections leading to this third chapter, the focus has been to establish the sonic and ideological tonalities of jazz through an examination of the music‘s association with the political discourses of black public intellectuals beginning from the 1930s. Chapter one located the catalyst for this political resonance as the selected works of Duke Ellington represented the creation of the counter-minstrel narrative in modern jazz. Chapter two investigated both the history and current debates that influenced the artistic radicalism within jazz in the 1930s, specifically through an investigation of the music‘s association with the Communist politics that shaped the discourse of black public intellectuals.

Chapter three continues to explore jazz‘s political trajectory focusing on how the counter- minstrel identity was further constructed by the politics at home and abroad. The third chapter follows jazz‘s transition towards the 1950s, beginning with a discussion of Paul

Robeson to establish the template of the transnational, politically active counter-minstrel identity in jazz discourse. This chapter also begins with Robeson in order to preview how the music engaged in a transnational setting, attempting to free itself from minstrelized constraints, while still negotiating its associative roots within a Leftist political discourse.

Afterwards, this chapter introduces the tours as one example of a larger set of cultural

―the deepest ironies and limits of the U.S. strategy of promoting black American jazz artists 126 occurrences that provide a representative springboard for the larger debates concerning the transnationalization of jazz in the 1950s. Therefore, what follows is not a description or an evaluation of the effectiveness of the individual tours. The history behind the tours, however, is presented in this chapter to demonstrate the burgeoning political capital of the musicians and the developing transnational appeal of jazz that was realized and put to use by the 1950s. Specifically, though, the tours signal the complex condition of the American racial environment—indicating the pressing need for the foreign stage and how the international practice and display of jazz provided an opportunity to voice an extended, counter-minstrel dialogue that expressed the concerns of liberation by people of color at home and abroad.

Robeson, Black Creative Intellectuals, and the American Government

Although Paul Robeson was not commonly referred to as a jazz artist, the singer, actor, public intellectual and activist was a crucial figure in the development of the foreign stage for black musicians and an integral arbiter of the transnationalization of African-

American cultural forms. In his career as an actor and singer, Robeson was defined by his unique bass-baritone voice, performing acclaimed renditions of African-American spirituals and folk songs to American and international crowds since the early 1920s. From his title role in Eugene O‘Neill‘s, The Emperor Jones, to his Broadway and overseas theatrical roles as Othello and Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L‘Ouverture, Robeson was an established celebrity and arguably the most famous African-American in the world by the 1950s. His stardom was the result of his talents but also because of his controversial commitment towards politicizing his artistic presence as he performed to a worldwide

as pro-American propaganda.‖ Von Eschen,127 Race Against Empire, 179. stage. As Robeson freed himself from the myopic stylistic constraints affixed to African-

American artists due to minstrelsy, his artistic versatility allowed for his celebrity and cultural influence to grow exponentially in a variety of artistic markets, engaging in a multitude of artistic projects as well as social and humanitarian causes worldwide.

A product of the Harlem Renaissance cultural explosion, Robeson was connected to the cultural and artistic sphere of jazz in a variety of ways. Artistically, Robeson associated with Harlem‘s musical awakening in the 1920s, performing—in addition to his repertoire of spiritual and folk based songs—popular songs from the Tin Pan Alley production machine alongside the theaters and ballrooms occupied predominantly by jazz artists, who coincidentally, played many of the same pieces. Alongside Robeson, other classically trained African-American vocalists, such as Roland Hayes and Marian Anderson, also fit securely within this unified rubric of jazz and jazz inspired performance. As numerous sonic elements from spirituals, blues, and ragtime shaped and defined the sonic, artistic, thematic, and general aesthetics of jazz, an amalgamated and unified vision of jazz that worked to include artistically minded black creative intellectuals with a variety of expertise.

Creatively speculating on this unified, rubric theory of jazz, Langston Hughes wrote a number of pieces that sought to connect the thematic aesthetics of jazz to the various political and intellectual movements found within the black community. In one example,

Hughes states:

Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate the closed ears of the Colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand. Let Paul Robeson singing ‗Water Boy,‘ and Rudolph Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his hands, and Aaron Douglas drawing strange black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle class to turn from their white respectability, ordinary books and

128 papers and catch a glimmer of their own individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame…The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs.21

Hughes‘s poetry ties a connective thread between Robeson, jazz, and alternate forms of black art, highlighting the music‘s functionality as a strident and unified black voice that would ―penetrate the closed ears‖ of a specifically minstrelized American climate. Granted illustrative voice by Hughes, the romanticized characterization of black artistic culture signifies the wide berth granted to folk elements as positive appraisals of black intellectual culture, particularly in the face of a segregated, minstrelized society that worked to negate those very attributes. Legitimated by this sense of shared traditional folk culture, Hughes concluded that the numerous strands all serve the same purpose of cultural representation, producing a unified and distinctly musical voice that illustrated the public concerns of African-American society.

In the 1920s, Robeson critiqued the legitimacy of this philosophical rubric, branding jazz as ―decadent‖ and rejecting the music as an inauthentic source and representation of African-American folk culture. Commenting that jazz ―exploits a Negro technique, but isn‘t Negro,‖ Robeson branded the music as ―childish‖ with ―something of the Negro sense of rhythm, but only some.‖22 However, Robeson began to soften his analysis in years later as the musical icon began frequenting jazz clubs and engaging in its circles by the late 1930s, declaratively stating by 1958 that ―for my money, modern jazz is one of the most important musical things there is in the world.‖23

21 Scott and Rutkoff, New York Modern, 142. 22 Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson: A Biography (New York: New Press, 1995), 176. 23 Duberman, Paul Robeson, 177. Also, Duberman includes Paul Robeson‘s positive theoretical assessment of jazz, stating, ―the jazz scale is a new and significant development in the history of music in general and American music in particular… (there 129 Robeson‘s viewpoint also changed as a result of his iconic influence on jazz musicians. In his analysis of swing‘s broad associations with leftist politics, Lewis

Erenberg identifies Robeson as a pop icon on par with heavyweight boxer Joe Louis— occupying a small space of mainstream oriented black identities that strongly challenged the minstrelized perceptions of African-American achievement on a publically recognized platform. Erenberg cites Dizzy Gillespie‘s cynical take on the subject, as Gillespie explained Robeson‘s preeminent stature amongst the African-American public, stating ―to be a ‗hero‘ in the black community, all you have to do is make the white folks look up to you and recognize the fact that you‘ve contributed something worthwhile.‖24

Specifically, Robeson‘s iconic relevancy was often filtered through the music of jazz, intensifying as the artist recognized the music‘s youthful following and capacity to incorporate, illustrate, and promote radicalized politics through its artistry. By 1941,

Robeson recorded ―King Joe,‖ a song written by John Hammond and accompanied by the

Count Basie Orchestra that glorified the athletic prowess and heroic stature of Joe Louis, and promoted his defeat of Nazi boxer Max Schemeling as a primary example of American and specifically, African-American accomplishment. In spite of the piece‘s upbeat and casual musical feel, Erenberg suggests the direct political poignancy of the piece as

Robeson and Hammond sought to provide a creative space to ―unify black and white leftists‖ and merge politics and music in an associative cause against the minstrelized trappings of a segregated society.25

is) a unique immediacy, a direct communication here and now—from the living to the living—which jazz seems to provide.‖ Duberman, Paul Robeson, 625. 24 Erenberg, Swingin‟ the Dream, 117. 25 Erenberg, Swingin‟ the Dream, 117. 130 Although stylistically a classically trained singer, Robeson was a part of the jazz rubric by the 1950s. If not linked by his direct musical endeavors, Robeson‘s lasting cultural and political influence amongst jazz musicians was measured by his status as an international icon and reputation as a radical public intellectual who frequently utilized his public platform as a stage for his politics. Ingrid Monson notes, ―Robeson‘s prestige cannot be overestimated as an inspiration to many in the entertainment industry.‖26

Gillespie further clarified this authority as the ―prestige‖ and ―influence‖ granted to

Robeson accessed various members of the growingly diverse community of black public intellectuals interested in black domestic and Pan-Africanist affairs. Gillespie stated that

―black people appreciate my playing in the same way I looked up to Paul Robeson or to Joe

Louis…Just because of his prowess in the field and because he‘s black like me.‖27 With this successful amalgamation of art, political relevance, and iconic recognition, Robeson was crucial in the implementation of a distinctly political and internationalist agenda within the conceptual, cultural, and sonic context of jazz. With his publicized interest in ―left- leaning internationalism‖ and ―African culture and politics‖ Robeson ―was the figure through which many jazz musicians came to know this perspective.‖28

Further noting Robeson‘s influence on the jazz public, historians Scott and Rutkoff commented on the activism of Robeson, along with longtime leftist and Pan-Africanist historian W.E.B. DuBois and their lasting radical influence on the artistic scene of New

York during the height of the Cold War.

W. E. B. DuBois and Paul Robeson inspired (jazz musicians) (Milt) Hinton and (Charlie) Parker. On the road the two often talked of

26 Ingrid Monson, ―Art Blakey‘s African Diaspora,‖ 331. 27 Erenberg, Swingin‟ the Dream, 117. 28 Ingrid Monson, ―Art Blakey‘s African Diaspora,‖ 330-331. 131 DuBois‘s message to black people. When they arrived at a new destination, ―we‘d get off the bus and be sure we got to this place to hear W. E. B. DuBois and this would be the focal point of our conversation.29

However, this politically themed dialogue between jazz artists concerning

Robeson‘s influence came with a level of fear and suspicion. Although meaningful in its radical display, Hinton and Gillespie remained cognizant of the stifling political climate of the Cold War era and were openly cautious of public retribution to their adherence of controversial, racially configurated ideology. As Scott and Rutkoff state:

To (Milt) Hinton and (Dizzy) Gillespie, Paul Robeson (also) symbolized the social aspirations of African-Americans at a time when his reputation had been tainted by his Communist Party affiliation. Fearful of Red-baiters, the politically minded jazz performers reacted cautiously, meeting Robeson on one occasion in Cleveland to talk about music and race relations but generally keeping their distance.30

Robeson‘s radical approach to politics and his continual critique of American racial policy was filtered through a staunchly Communist perspective, shaped in part from his travels to Russia and Western Europe in the 1930s. In 1935, Robeson‘s visit to Moscow was covered by Vern Smith of the Daily Worker, and illustrated Robeson, the son of a slave, as an ideological and physical counterpart to the ―Russian sons of serfs who now are freed by their own efforts.‖31 Robeson‘s visit was marked by his unflinchingly affirmative rhetoric towards Communist policy and its perceived positive effects on the people of

Russia, stating furthermore that ―from what I have already seen of the workings of the

29 Scott and Rutkoff, New York Modern, 277. 30 Scott and Rutkoff, New York Modern, 277. 31 Vern Smith, "I Am at Home,‘ Says Robeson at Reception in Soviet Union,‖ Daily Worker, January 15, 1935. 132 Soviet government, I can only say that anybody who lifts his hand against it ought to be shot!‖32

Robeson‘s radicalism formed though his scholarship of international politics in

Haiti and Africa and particularly the Italo-Ethiopian war of 1935 which Brenda Plummer summarized as ―the first great manifestation of Afro-American interest in foreign affairs,‖ in part because of Ethiopia‘s refusal to surrender in spite of the former Kingdom of Italy‘s superior forces.33 As Italy invaded Ethiopia in the occupational ―scramble of Africa‖ with the monetary aid of the Soviet Union, black communists faced a conflict of ideological interests stemming from their Pan-Africanist inclinations as opposed to their political and philosophical associations with Russia. Robeson went on record to criticize the Soviet sponsored invasion without indicting the U.S.S.R., stating ―my sympathy is all with the

Ethiopians. It would seem that these people could get along without the kind of ‗civilizing‘ that European nations do with bombs and machine guns.‖34 Faithful to the Soviet Union,

Robeson‘s internationalist perspective was funneled through an unyielding pro-Communist ethos, as biographers Boyle and Bunie comment that ―in 1935, Robeson‘s relationship with the (Pan-African) movement centered primarily around his own interest in African cultures and languages—and not on African political issues.‖35 Throughout the 1930s and 1940s,

Robeson‘s international agenda reflected these centered interests, co-founding the Council

32 Smith, "I Am at Home,‖ Daily Worker. Duberman‘s biography on Robeson detailed the singer‘s affinity for Russia and its political foundation. Robeson declares, ―the country was entirely free of racial prejudice and…Afro-American spiritual music resonated to Russian folk traditions. Here for the first time in my life…I walk in full human dignity.‖ Duberman, Paul Robeson, 461. 33 L. Lamphere, "Paul Robeson, ‗Freedom‘ Newspaper, and the Black Press" (PhD diss., Boston College, 2003), 22. 34 Lamphere, "Paul Robeson, ‗Freedom‘ Newspaper, and the Black Press,‖ 22. 35 Lamphere, "Paul Robeson, ‗Freedom‘ Newspaper, and the Black Press,‖ 23. 133 on African Affairs (CAA) in 1937 which, according to Von Eschen, ―helped keep the issue of colonial liberation on the U.S. agenda and provided links to international anticolonial networks and African Liberation groups.‖36

Working to restructure the image of Communists in the Harlem scene during WW2,

Mark Naison positions the leftist organization as a, ―towering‖ presence ―over Harlem‘s leftist cultural scene.‖ Naison continues, citing that, ―giving it much of its energy, stood the figure of Paul Robeson,‖ highlighting Robeson‘s ―luminous personality and immense talents‖ that ―gave an aura of legitimacy to his political posture, which differed little from the official party line.‖37 In part, Robeson‘s visits to the Soviet Union outlined his theoretical connection with the intellectual community of the jazz sphere. This association was outlined in Robeson‘s description of the perceived merits of the foreign stage, whereas the artist and black public intellectual could traverse the trappings of their minstrelized surroundings and present their work and persona in a light unaffected by segregated racial politics. Smith comments further on his travels abroad:

What he admitted he had not been expecting was the simple, wholehearted, affectionate welcome that lay in store for him. Robeson declares himself that he knows he has made a sufficient place for himself by his singing and acting, that even in the capitalist world some of the bitterest aspects of Jim Crowism and white chauvinism are not applied to him. But it is just this feeling that a condescending exception has been made of him that is missing here.38

As the foreign stage was exalted by Robeson, his rhetoric established his clear connection to the rubric of jazz. In his efforts to escape the ―bitterest aspects of Jim

Crowism,‖ Robeson presents a response to the ―chauvinist‖ domain of minstrelsy and ideologically aligns himself with the artistic goals and functions of jazz music and its

36 Lamphere, "Paul Robeson, ‗Freedom‘ Newspaper, and the Black Press,‖ 27. 37 Lamphere, "Paul Robeson, ‗Freedom‘ Newspaper, and the Black Press,‖ 34, 35. 134 musicians through an internationalist perspective. His association is also solidified by his commitment to the central tenets exalted in Locke‘s New Negro. Serving as a discursive shadow to a counter-minstrel identity, New Negro ideology provides the template for a vision of black cultural uplift that is carried into existence through a number of societal philosophies including Marxism, democracy and black nationalist identity. Clearly representing its display through Communist activity, Robeson‘s New Negroism is shaped by his internationalist perspective and the freedoms granted through the foreign stage.

Robeson‘s persistent activism was channeled through his artistic endeavors as the singer often incorporated his political perspective in the midst of his performances on foreign and domestic stages during the thirties and forties. With his example instituting an international character to the black public creative intellectual, Robeson‘s controversial

Stalinist perspective was concertized broadly abroad in Europe and the Soviet Union using his celebrity to publicize a forum for his art and political discourse. At home as well,

Robeson used the stage and his influence to critique the violently racist conditions of the

American south and the perceived racial hypocrisies of the American north. In 1946,

Robeson founded the American Crusade Against Lynching and issued forth his political message alongside various presidential campaigns, amongst the congregations of black churches, and in the halls of various conferences and symposiums. Reflecting on the various details of Robeson‘s life, journalist Phil Ponce detailed the artist‘s communist- inspired political activism illustrating his numerous struggles to speak his message of black political, social, and economic empowerment during the height of the cold war climate.

Robeson continually spoke out against the U.S. government accusing it of genocidal policies toward the 15 million blacks in America. A 1949 concert in

38 Smith, "I Am at Home,‖ Daily Worker. 135 Peekskill, New York, turned into a riot, when anti-Communist demonstrators stopped the performance. Anti-Communist riots like these led to an industry-wide boycott of Robeson from any American concert hall or recording contract, nor was he allowed to perform overseas.39

Alongside these Anti-Communist riots, Jane De Hart Matthews suggests that the swift and oppressive tactics employed by the federal government to quiet this perceived

Communist threat was the result of a failing U.S. foreign policy to control the same

―subversion‖ abroad.40 Matthews further states that the prompt reactions of censorship, surveillance, and ―anti-Communist crusades leading to patriotic excesses‖ were the lasting reactions of the American government due in part to the ―deteriorating political climate of the early fifties.‖41 The result of this backlash to the non-conformist, radically motivated politics of African-Americans was decisive. Alongside Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois were dealt with promptly once it became clear that their socialist-inspired, ―subversive‖ voices were in essence, loud enough to reach the masses of African-Americans and other persons of color who felt the effects of marginalization at the hands of racially motivated, democratic politics. Mary Dudziak speaks of the environment of the 1950‘s as a tumultuous and racialized climate and one which immediately expelled any persons who

39 Phil Ponce, ―Remembering Paul Robeson,‖ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/remember/1998/robeson_4-9a.html, (April 9, 1998). Venturing on a similar terrain to that of Robeson was the noted scholar, W. E. B. DuBois who embodied the socialist ethic in his politicized activism throughout his career. His voice against the societal injustices of the American mainstream began in the early twentieth century as DuBois affirmed a notion of black ―racialism,‖ which radically embodied the ―twoness‖ of the African-American, and gave voice to the inherent Americanized qualities (qualities, traits, class benefits, and merits typically afforded to whites) in the total self of the Negro. Both DuBois and Robeson were vigorous activists in the continual pursuit of African-American civil rights. 40 Matthews states, ―fed by frustrations with a U. S. foreign policy that failed to ‗win‘ diplomatic victories against the Soviet Union, these (anti-Communist) crusades became increasingly concerned with internal subversion.‖ Jane de Hart Mathews, "Art and Politics in Cold War America," American Historical Review 81 (October 1976): 768. 136 threatened not only the mainstream way of life in America but also endangered the foreign policies of the American government.

In this environment, African-Americans who criticized race discrimination in the United States before an international audience added fuel to an already troublesome fire. When the actor and singer Paul Robeson, the writer W. E. B. DuBois, and others spoke out abroad about American racial problems, they angered government officials because the officials saw them as exacerbating an already difficult problem. The State Department could and did attempt to counter the influence of such critics on international opinion by sending speakers around the world who would say the right things about American race relations. The ―right thing‖ to say was, yes, there were racial problems in the United States, but it was through democratic processes (not Communism) that optimal social change for African Americans would occur…Consequently, in the early 1950‘s the passports of Robeson, DuBois, and Civil Rights Congress chairperson William Patterson were confiscated because their travel abroad was ―contrary to the best interests of the United States.42

Dudziak‘s paragraph also illustrates a specific strategy of the American government to control all facets of its foreign policy, specifically through the methods of altruism and philanthropy in which broad notions of goodwill and democratic progressivism were championed in order to counter the realistic perception of America‘s ―difficult problem‖ concerning race relations. Robeson‘s example displays a dedicated case of a black creative public intellectual influenced by a Marxist trajectory. However, his development into a global icon clarifies the agency and lasting legacy of his counter-minstrel identity.

The “Real Ambassadors” and the “Albatross” of Racism

Established during the height of post-WWII international tensions, the Goodwill

Tours were drafted and carried out through various levels of government to function as a

41 Mathews, "Art and Politics in Cold War America," 768. 42 Mary Dudziak, "Josephine Baker, Racial Protest and the Cold War," Journal of American History (September 1994): 546. 137 diplomatic employment of Cold War foreign policy.43 Devised to display a sense of diplomacy and goodwill abroad, musicians with noted appeal and worldwide experience, such as ―Ambassador Satch,‖ were ideally positioned as representatives of the State to project the ideological merits of American democracy in an international setting through a display of their art and celebrity.44 The tours were strategically set forth in various cities of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, with gigs taking place predominantly in the concert venues of redeveloping nations under colonial rule, where the specter of Communism loomed over the re-establishing governments.45 As part of a campaign of influence set forth by the United States government in the late 1940s, along with other federally funded endeavors of arts and leisure, the tours engaged America‘s Cold War acquisition of ideological real estate in the politically, socially, and industrially redeveloping world of the

Post-WWII era. 46

By 1956, government spending in the field of Cold War sponsored foreign policy endeavors spiked to a yearly average of $109 million in the federal budget. This increase allowed for the creation of cultural-based programs that organized as part of a general plan

43 Von Eschen connects the tours with the CIA, Congress, and ―initially supervised by the State Department in conjunction with the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA), the programs involved an expansive notion of culture and a wide array of the arts.‖ Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World, 6. 44 The moniker was coined by George Avakian, a record producer for Columbia Records. 45 Von Eschen states, ―Aiming to spread jazz globally in order to win converts to ‗the American way of life,‘ proponents of the tours cited the popularity of jazz in Europe to make their case.‖ Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World, 7. 46 Von Eschen states that the U.S. government ―sketched a vision in which band leaders such as Gillespie, Armstrong, and Count Basie and their bands would be sent ‗into countries where Communism has a foothold.‖ Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World, 7. 138 to dismantle the growing ideological effects of Communism in redeveloping nations.47

Eventually falling under the direct auspices of the State Department, the Goodwill Tours provided the foreign public with the, ―more soothing sounds of America,‖ instilling the projected virtues of American diversity and artistry upon a foreign public and effectively reorganizing the Popular Front strategy of Cultural programming abroad as a newly viable tactic in the acquisition of influence in the Post-WW2 world.48 Among the supporters was

President Eisenhower who had appealed to the Senate in 1954 for specialized budgetary funds for the formation of artistic and cultural programs, noting the overseas success and influence of Porgy and Bess as an indicator of the international demand for American cultural products and its potential usefulness in matters of foreign policy.49 Originally instituted in 1954 under the President‘s Special International Program for Cultural

Presentations, and overseen by the Bureau of International Educational and Cultural Affairs of the Department of State, by 1956, the program received ―full legislative sanction‖ under the International Cultural and Trade Fairs Participation Act of 1956 (PL-806).50 After the initial brief tours of the American Ballet Theater and New York Philharmonic, Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell encouraged the Bureau of Educational and Cultural

Affairs to send jazz musicians as the chief ambassadors of the program. With help from

47 Scott Gac calculates that these figures ―represent part of a broader foreign policy that included military and diplomatic resources.‖ Scott Gac, ―Jazz Strategy: Dizzy, Foreign Policy, and Government in 1956,‖ The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900- present) 4, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 1. 48 Von Eschen adds to this discussion by stating: ―As for jazz, State Department officials had picked up on the fact that there was avid interest in jazz in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, providing officials with what they viewed as a unique opportunity to fight the cultural cold war.‖ Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World, 166. 49 Eisenhower to the President of the Senate, No. 82, 83rd Congress, 2nd Session, July 27, 1954 found in Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World, 4. 139 noted jazz aficionado Marshall Sterns, Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Stan

Kenton and Duke Ellington were named as the top choices for the ambassadorial program.51

Conspicuously, the headliners of the early tours consisted predominantly of

African-Americans and interracial combos—thus, publically endorsing the artistic

virtuosity and professional accomplishments of black creative intellectuals to display an

impression of cultural plurality against the aggressively minstrelized and internationally

perceived realities of a Jim Crow society. Von Eschen‘s analysis comments on the State

Department‘s desire to suggest that African-American artistry, with its improvised and

sonically palatable appeal would better sell the ideological package of the Goodwill

Tours. Furthermore, Von Eschen declared ―U.S. officials would simultaneously insist on

the universal, race-transcending quality of jazz while depending on the blackness of

musicians to legitimize America‘s global agendas was an abiding paradox of the tours.‖52

In his study of the tours, Scott Gac posited on the pressing need for black

ambassadors, citing the ―charge of racism‖ put forth by the Soviet Union to the

international public, noting specifically that this propagandized assertion was the ―one

50 Ingrid Monson, Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 111. 51 Alyn Shipton describes the selection process of Dizzy Gillespie after the artist gained a more mainstream footing in popular music. Shipton states, ―it was at this point that Adam Clayton Powell recommended to the International Exchange Program of the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA) that Dizzy, leading a big band, would be a suitable candidate to pioneer a proposed series of overseas tours by American musicians…By actively promoting one of America‘s most visible and internationally popular assets, jazz, through a budget underwritten by the State Department, a positive image of the United States would be conveyed to audiences across the globe.‖ Shipton, Groovin' High, 280. 52 Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World, 4. 140 censure that stuck,‖ in evidencing ―an unenlightened America.‖53 The problematic of

race as interpreted through this transnational gaze suggested a newfound dilemma

experienced by the American government in its pursuit of Cold War ideological and

geographic real estate. Realized in a number of Supreme Court briefs, as well as a

variety of reports from the Fair Employment Practices Commission and the President‘s

Committee on Civil Rights, the problem of racial discrimination as well as its impact on

foreign relations had escalated into a widespread dilemma for the overall prosperity and

civil peace of the United States.54 In 1946, the American Embassy in Moscow reported

that various articles on American racial problems had been published in the Soviet media,

indicating that the realities of U.S. racial politics promoted an image nightmare for the

promotion of the mainstream American way of life.55 As the minstrelized and

53 Gac, ―Jazz Strategy,‖ 2. Gac continues that the, ―communist media accessed a seemingly endless stream of material to present to their readers,‖ concerning the state of racial affairs in the United States. Also, Von Eschen states that ―the Eisenhower administration had tried to counter Soviet charges of American racism through its financing of the four-year Cold War tour of Porgy and Bess.‖ Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World, 4. 54 Excerpts from Secretary of State Dean Acheson in 1946, The President‘s Civil Rights Committee report To Secure These Rights from 1947, and Brown v. Board all detail this burgeoning problem of racial discrimination. Dean Acheson stated, ―The existence of discrimination against minority groups in this country has had an adverse effect upon our relations with other countries. We are reminded over and over by some foreign newspapers and spokesman, that our treatment of various minorities leaves much to be desired.‖ See Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 80,100. 55 Dudziak states, ―In a world divided by Cold War, it was frightening to see the Soviet Union capitalize on America‘s ―Achilles heel.‖ Soviet propaganda exploited U.S. racial problems, arguing that American professions of liberty and equality under democracy were a sham. The U.S. embassy in Moscow took notice of this issue in 1946, reporting that a number of articles a year ―may portend stronger emphasis on this theme as (a) Soviet propaganda weapon.‖ In August 1946, the U.S. embassy in Moscow sent the State Department a translation of an editorial from the periodical Trud that was, ―representative of the frequent Soviet press comment on the question of Negro discrimination in the United States.‖ Soviet reporting did not require extensive research. 141 systematically encompassing order of racial discrimination ran virtually uninterrupted in

the domestic sphere, the international community observed these contradictions of

democratic social policy and presented the United States with a peculiar problem.56 In

essence, America‘s albatross in the acquisition of global influence was its own

certification of government sanctioned racism.57 Von Eschen contributes to this query,

stating that, ―despite the government‘s complacency on domestic race relations, even

Eisenhower was profoundly affected by the widely shared sense that race was America‘s

Achilles heel internationally.‖58

Countering these proclamations became a primary concentration of the State

Department as the United States gained its most useful ally in the Cold War fight with the

American press. Felix Belair of the New York Times further simplified the charges

behind the Soviet argument, stating in his opening lead that, ―America‘s secret weapon

right now is a blue note,‖ explaining that ―right now its most effective ambassador is

The Trud article was based on information the Soviets had gathered from the, ―progressive American press.‖ It described lynchings and poor conditions for African Americans in the South.‖ Dudziak concludes, ―According to Trud, American periodicals had reported, ―the increasing frequency of terroristic acts against Negroes,‖ including ―the bestial mobbing of four negroes by a band of 20 to 25 whites‖ in July 1946 in Monroe, Georgia.‖ Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 35-39. 56 Dudziak adds, ―Concern about the impact of race discrimination on foreign relations permeated government-sponsored civil rights efforts in the late 1940s and early 1950s. the international implications of civil rights were continually noted in briefs in the United States Supreme Court and in government reports.‖ Dudziak, "Josephine Baker, Racial Protest and the Cold War," 546. 57 Again, Dudziak posits that, ―on one hand, the United states claimed that democracy was superior to Communism as a form of government, particularly in its protection of individual rights and liberties; on the other hand, the nation practiced pervasive race discrimination.‖ Dudziak, "Josephine Baker, Racial Protest and the Cold War," 544. 58 Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World, 5. 142 Louis (Satchmo) Armstrong.‖59 Belair concludes, stating ―a telling propaganda line is

the hopped-up tempo of (his) Dixieland band heard on the Voice of America in far off

Tangiers.‖60 Curiously, the only specific mention of race in Belair‘s article remained

verbally implicit as the picture of Armstrong served as Belair‘s only identifiable indicator

of race. Without its specific mention, Belair‘s account adds towards the discourse of

jazz‘s explicit connection to democratic ideals; as Satchmo‘s smiling, black visage

signified the proposed willingness of African-American jazz artists to represent the

racially inclusive, democratic tenets of the nation. Belair concludes, stating that

―American jazz has now become a universal language. It knows no boundaries but

everybody knows where it comes from and where to look for more.‖61 This constructed

message concerning a perceived universality within jazz and particularly Belair‘s indirect

reference to the collective appeal of artists such as Armstrong is the primary assumption

on the part of the State Department as it followed its interests in the pursuit of influence

during the tumultuous climate of the Cold War. In essence, Armstrong potentially served

as the ultimate Cold War strategy. As jazz‘s venerable statesman, Armstrong‘s

constructed image and his good time swing are positioned as the keys to successful

diplomacy further implying that jazz had become the most effective tactical tool on the

part of the American government to win the hearts and minds of the foreign youth.62

59 Belair, Jr., ―United States has Secret Sonic Weapon—Jazz,‖ 12. 60 Belair, Jr., ―United States has Secret Sonic Weapon—Jazz,‖ 12. 61 Belair, Jr., ―United States has Secret Sonic Weapon—Jazz,‖ 12. 62 Belair states the previously ―unexplained question‖ of Europeans and notes their former frustrations concerning their lack of access to American jazz. Belair states that, ―what many thoughtful Europeans (could not) understand is why the United States Government with all the money it spends on so-called propaganda to promote democracy 143 Alongside the planned strategic deployment of Armstrong, the U.S. government sponsored a variety of overseas cultural programming, ranging from radio shows, concerts and plays that worked to present, ―American achievement rather than American failure.‖63

The urgency behind the multi-media efforts stemmed from the critical nature of the Soviet- sponsored publications that indicted the U.S. government over its treatment of African-

Americans abroad and in the ―popular presses in India, Mexico, Greece, Haiti, and Great

Britain.‖64 Eager to secure a space on the foreign stage for black artists, Powell pushed for mainstream and internationally known musicians such as Armstrong and Gillespie. As two of jazz‘s most popular and recognizable faces they were a logical choice to initiate the

Goodwill Tours for the U.S. State Department. In a biography on the life of Dizzy

Gillespie, Alyn Shipton commented on the political implications behind choice of Gillespie as a goodwill ambassador, stating that ―the idea was simple …the image conveyed by a multiracial big band under a black leader was substantially more positive than the reality in many parts of the United States.‖65 Symbolically, Louis Armstrong was an ideal choice for the role of a jazz ambassador. Affectionately known as ―Pops‖ for his paternalistic influence over younger musicians and the history and development of jazz, Armstrong was one of the genre‘s most widely beloved figures due to his considerable talent and amiable stage personality. Named one of the ―brightest lights‖ of 1956, the Pittsburgh Courier exalted Armstrong‘s abilities as an ambassador given ―the easy manner in which he won

does not use more of it to subsidize the continental travels of jazz bands and the best exponents of the music. Belair, Jr., ―United States has Secret Sonic Weapon—Jazz,‖ 12. 63 Gac, ―Jazz Strategy,‖ 2-3. 64 Gac, ―Jazz Strategy,‖ 2-3. 65 Shipton, Groovin' High, 280. 144 friends for Uncle Sam overseas.‖66 As an endurable symbol spanning from the Jazz Age of the 1920s, his good-time music and frequently donned wide grin was instantly likeable and strategically provided a suitable counter to the claims of racism and civil unrest put forth by

Communists abroad.

Ambassador Satch and the Influence of the Foreign Stage

Armstrong‘s political capital was realized in the 1950s by the American government for an assortment of matters of both international and domestic importance.

Unofficially sanctioned by the government before the official start of the Goodwill Tours,

Armstrong had visited the Gold Coast of Africa in May 1956 as part of Edward R.

Murrow‘s film, Satchmo the Great, greeting crowds of thousands and receiving an

―outpouring of press and public enthusiasm‖ from the foreign public.67 Performing for

President-elect Kwame Nkrumah, the tour situated the musician as a representative of the broader American designs to sponsor black artists as propagandists of a pro-American ideology that promoted a racialized solidarity between Africans and African-Americans.68

Observing Armstrong‘s visit, journalist Horace Cayton weighed in on the political significance of the concerts citing the oft romanticized depiction of internationalism amongst the worldwide black public, yet witnessing its actualized power as a developing political consciousness amongst non-white oppressed peoples. Citing the ―deep symbolic meaning‖ resulting from the ―deep bonds of mutual sympathy between American and

66 Penny Von Eschen, ―Exploding Cold War Racial Ideology,‖ in Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945-1966, edited by Christian Appy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 126. 67 ―Scream ‗We Want Satchmo‘ as the ‗Saga of Armstrong‘ Hits Ghana,‖ The Chicago Defender, March 16, 1957, 8. 145 African Negroes,‖ Cayton extends Satchmo‘s influence towards a global diasporic context, constructing connective bonds of cross-cultural heritage through the experience of jazz, and consciously recognizing the foreign stage as a site of productive diasporic convergence.69

Cayton stated that, ―the hundreds of thousands of Africans were not only cheering Louis

Armstrong as an artist and musician, or as an American. They were cheering Louis

Armstrong as the representative of 15 million American Negroes.‖70 With strength in numbers, Armstrong‘s acquisition of a foreign audience certified the political capital of jazz from an international perspective.

Alongside this political currency, however, Armstrong‘s capital was discreetly challenged by the FBI after the State Department received a letter in 1956 from Paris, revealing that the Congress of Scholars of the Negro World, an organization ―sponsored by the leftist ‗Presence Africaine,‖ issued invitations to ―black writers and artists,‖ including

Louis Armstrong for a cultural review and summit of the ―black world.‖71 The classified monitoring of Armstrong became a more publically engaged matter as the artist became more outspoken on the current affairs of African-Americans. By 1957, Armstrong‘s political capital was drastically subverted as the artist issued forth a number of controversial statements against the segregated social policies of the U.S. state and federal government. On September 19, 1957, while performing a concert in Grand Folks, N.D.,

Armstrong announced his plans to back out of his ambassadorial duties ―because of the

68 ―Ghana Born!‖ The Daily Defender, March 6, 1957, 4. 69 Von Eschen, ―Exploding Cold War Racial Ideology,‖ 126-127. 70 Von Eschen, ―Exploding Cold War Racial Ideology,‖ 127. 71 Federal Bureau of Investigation, ―Louis Armstrong,‖ excerpted, Freedom of Information Privacy Act http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/armstrong.htm (accessed 25 September 2007). 146 way they are treating my people in the south.‖72 Defiantly, Armstrong continued by stating that the ―government can go to hell,‖ calling President Eisenhower ―two-faced,‖ with ―no guts,‖ for allowing Jim Crow and the rhetoric and practices of Arkansas Governor Orville

Faubus to ―run the country.‖73 Armstrong‘s condemnation of Eisenhower and Faubus continued the following week, presenting an analysis that critiqued the handling of the black students involved in the landmark desegregation case in Little Rock, Arkansas, stating, ―my people—the Negroes—are not looking for anything—we just want a square shake. But when I see on television and read about a crowd in Arkansas spitting and cursing at a little colored girl—I think I have a right to get sore—and say something about it.‖74 Armstrong‘s sharpest vitriol was saved for Faubus, declaring the segregationist ―an uneducated plowboy,‖ in response to the Governor‘s continual protest over the admission of black students in previously segregated schools in Little Rock Arkansas.75

Armstrong‘s critique came in the midst of a concerted effort by the African-

American press to address segregation and the role black artists should play to challenge and counter their minstrelized surroundings. Singling out Armstrong due to his augmented level of celebrity, George E. Pitts wrote an article in the Pittsburgh Courier, entitled,

―Segregated Audiences Should be Abolished,‖ promoting a code of social responsibility

72 Federal Bureau of Investigation, ―Louis Armstrong,‖ excerpted, Freedom of Information Privacy Act http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/armstrong.htm (accessed 25 September 2007). 73 Federal Bureau of Investigation, ―Louis Armstrong,‖ excerpted, Freedom of Information Privacy Act http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/armstrong.htm (accessed 25 September 2007). 74 ‖Satch Blast Echoed by Top Performers: Nixes Tour, Ras Ike and Faubus‖ Chicago Defender, September 28, 1957. 75 ―Satchmo‘ Tells Off Ike,‖ Pittsburgh Courier 48, no. 39, September 28, 1957. 147 amongst artists, managers, and fans to reject in the total rejection of Jim Crow standards.76

Ingrid Monson also cited the pressures placed on black artists by the black press, stating that ―the jazz press of the forties published many indignant articles and editorials about continuing Jim Crow policies in the music business that illustrate the development of a pro- integration discourse in the jazz world that mobilized the ideas of democracy, equality, and protest on its behalf.‖77

Armstrong‘s outrage over racial injustice deviated from the traditionally accommodating nature of his public image. And subsequent to his time on the foreign stage, his views began to reflect a stronger commitment towards the public critique of

American race relations. Recognizing the agency of his worldwide celebrity from the success of his Gold Coast tour, Armstrong cancelled his federally funded Goodwill Tour as part of his newly shaped, internationally inspired public politics that brought into question larger issues of citizenship and national identity for African-Americans. Armstrong‘s critique continued, implying passionately that ―the people over there ask me what‘s wrong with my country. What am I supposed to say?‖78 Adding to his public disillusionment and feelings of racially subjugated political displacement, Armstrong added, ―it‘s getting so bad a colored man hasn‘t got any country.‖79 According to ―insiders‖ at the Chicago Defender,

Governor Faubus reportedly responded to Armstrong‘s critique, stating that ―Ike proved his lack of greatness when he allowed himself to become disturbed over criticism by Louis

76 George E. Pitts, ―Segregated Audiences Should Be Abolished!‖ Pittsburgh Courier 48, no. 9, March 2, 1957. 77 Monson, Freedom Sounds, 31. 78 Monson, Freedom Sounds, 3. 79 Von Eschen, Race Against Empire, 180. 148 Armstrong.‖80 Armstrong‘s influence, however, became widely noted as other black artists began to voice their politicized concerns. In the Daily Defender, Lena Horne claimed ―I, too would decline to appear in Russia if I were asked by the government because I would fear embarrassing questions by the press, especially the Soviet press.‖81 Eartha Kitt also declared that ―Armstrong is absolutely right,‖ calling President Eisenhower a ―man without a soul‖ and stating that ―all the purpose of this whole country is being lost‖ under racial segregation.82 Furthermore, Jackie Robinson ―congratulated‖ Armstrong for his critique, commenting on Armstrong‘s influence and declaring that ―this is a feeling that is becoming rampant among Negroes.‖83

By the 1950s, a generation of bop musicians had largely disregarded Armstrong‘s innovative talent, commercial fame, and staggering musical legacy and had written off the artist as a relic of the minstrel show. In his autobiography, Miles Davis situated Armstrong with ―some of the images of black people that I would fight against all through my career,‖ including Buckwheat, Beulah, Rochester, and other archetypal figures re-imagined in the pop culture minstrelsy of the 1950s.84 Davis summed up his perspective, claiming ―I loved

Satchmo, but I couldn‘t stand all that grinning he did.‖ James Baldwin‘s ―Sonny‘s Blues‖ also described the sentiment of this perspective with the title character referring to the style and aesthetics of Armstrong as ―old-time, down home crap.‖ Given this socially and

80 Al Monroe, ―So They Say,‖ The Chicago Defender, September 6, 1958, 20. 81 ―Back Stachmo‘s Blasts at Ike, Gov. Faubus, Daily Defender, September 24, 1957, 18. 82 ―Back Stachmo‘s Blasts at Ike, Gov. Faubus, Daily Defender, September 24, 1957, 18. 83 ―Back Stachmo‘s Blasts at Ike, Gov. Faubus, Daily Defender, September 24, 1957, 18. 84 Miles Davis, Miles the Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 96.

149 artistically irrelevant label, Armstrong‘s defiant critique displayed his willingness to step outside of the minstrelized realm as African-Americans publically engaged in what would become landmarks in civil rights history. Langston Hughes questioned this cultural dynamic that automatically situated the ―old-time‖ Armstrong within the minstrel milieu of the Cold War era, asking, ―why, I‘d like to know, must we be so quick to build up ecclesiastical, untouchable heroes in the fad manner, and destroy everyone else who doesn‘t fit at the moment?‖85 Hughes continues, stating ―I don‘t discount Louis Armstrong because Miles Davis is here, and I cannot destroy Satchel Paige just because Bob Gibson is here.‖86 From the enormous pressures brought on by the black press, the questions of the world community, and his responsibility as an ambassador to faithfully represent the ideals of American society, Armstrong issued forth a perspective that dropped the minstrel grin he had maintained for decades, unmasking a counter-minstrel identity that propelled a character independent of racist cultural assumptions and stereotype.

Alongside Armstrong‘s assessments, other artists began to publically voice an analysis of American social policy, particularly when brought forth for examination under the gaze of the international community. Dizzy Gillespie, another premier choice for the

Goodwill Tours, reflected the tension stating, ―I sort‘ve like the idea of representing

America, but I wasn‘t going to apologize for the racist policies of America…I know what they‘ve done to us and I‘m not going to make any excuses.‖87 Granting the artist an

85 Langston Hughes, ―Booker T. Pro and Con,‖ The Chicago Defender, May 8, 1965, 8. 86 Langston Hughes, ―Booker T. Pro and Con,‖ The Chicago Defender, May 8, 1965, 8. 87 Von Eschen, Race Against Empire, 170. Gillespie‘s perspective, however, eventually presented a more moderate take on the situation, offering a perspective that fell in line with the presented mission of the State Department. Gillespie states, ―They (foreign 150 audience and opportunity to express their domestic discontent, the foreign stage provided a space of exposure that brought into question the minstrelized restrictions that marginalized the political, social, and cultural capital of African-Americans experienced within the borders of the United States. Allowing for a non-minstrelized critique of race relations, the international character constructed within jazz influenced the public, artistic and political discourse of the artists, employing a direct and publically transnational critique of

American race-based social policy.

Bridging from this example, the musical works of artists such as Art Blakey and

Dizzy Gillespie reflected a broad yet affixed relationship to the Diaspora—sonically operating alongside the broadly defined context of a Pan-Africanist philosophical discourse that began to make its way to the black press during the initial stages of the Cold War.88

Initially traveling to Africa to pursue personal studies in the Islamic faith, Blakey developed works that comprised of an internationalized influence, reconstructing the musical and ideological makeup of jazz to incorporate distinctively Africanized elements and Islamic philosophical tenets within its sonic and visual registry.89 In her study of

audiences) could see it wasn‘t as intense because we had white boys and I was the leader of the band. That was strange to them because they‘d heard about blacks being lynched and burned, and here I come with half whites and blacks and a girl playing in the band. And everybody seemed to be getting along fine. So I don‘t try to hide anything. I said, ‗yeah…we have our problems but we‘re still working on it.‘ I‘m the leader of this band, and those white guys are working for me. That‘s a helluva thing.‖ Gac, ―Jazz Strategy,‖ 12. 88 Monson declares, ―it is clear that members of the New York jazz community of the 1940s demonstrated awareness of both the anticolonialist internationalism of Robeson and DuBois, as well as the more cultural and spiritual pan-Africanism and pan-Asianism of Islam.‖ Monson, ―Art Blakey‘s African Diaspora,‖ 335. 89 Reflecting on his interest in Islam, Blakey stated that, ―Islam brought the black man what he was looking for, an escape like some found in drugs or drinking: a way of living and thinking he could choose freely. This is the reason we adopted this new religion 151 Blakey‘s works, Ingrid Monson reflected on Blakey‘s post-bop musical sensibilities of the

1950s, as pieces such as ―Message from Kenya,‖ ―Ritual,‖ and ―Orgy in Rhythm,‖ featured elaborately African rhythmic variations within the compositions.90 Monson states, ―like

West African master drummers, who lead from the lowest pitched instrument, Blakey introduces riff patterns on low toms that ‗cut‘ the texture established by the accompanying percussionists‖ in order to tell ―a story about the Ijaw people‖ and ―invoke the notion of

African and ritual.‖91 Transitioning towards a more individualized artistic field, Blakey‘s jazz exemplified the complete musical shift from dance oriented swing towards the smaller combo dynamics of the bop sound, characterized primarily by faster tempos, chordal-based harmonic structures (rather than the melodies of swing) and an ardent emphasis on improvisation. As improvisation emblematizes the sound, this post-bop genre inevitably took on a more personalized expressive feel. And as Blakey‘s musical conversion reflected what Monson referred to as the ―African diasporic rhythmic conceptions‖ emblematic of post-bop, Blakey becomes a realization of the foreign stage, developing an internationalized counter-minstrel narrative in his music that focused on reconstructing the traditional minstrel narrative that exposed African culture from a subjugated and racist perspective.92

in such numbers. It was for us, above all, a way of rebelling.‖ Monson, ―Art Blakey‘s African Diaspora,‖ 337. 90 Monson states, ―Blakey‘s playing on these recordings shows a more than passing awareness of African and Afro-Cuban means of rhythmic variation and musical development, and their timing suggests Blakey‘s active knowledge of independence events in Ghana.‖ Although Monson cites Blakey‘s overall de-politicized of his own works, Monson declares that his works ―are important in understanding how African diasporic rhythmic conceptions contributed to the shaping of an expanded idea of the jazz rhythm section.‖ Monson, ―Art Blakey‘s African Diaspora,‖ 337. 91 Monson, ―Art Blakey‘s African Diaspora,‖ 339. 92 Monson, ―Art Blakey‘s African Diaspora,‖ 337. 152 In addition, Dizzy Gillespie, who had developed an interest in Cuban music in the late thirties, began to fully explore the cultural and sonic amalgamation of Afro-Cuban jazz by the late 1940s. Also known as ―Cubop,‖ a style employing the standard ¾ and 6/8 rhythmic patterns of Latin music with the harmonies and melodic timbre of the bop sound,

Gillespie collaborated with Cuban composer and percussionist Luciano ―Chano‖ Pozo with pieces such as ―Manteca‖ which took on various musical incarnations as a short piece and full length suite, eventually becoming the musical centerpiece for an anti-segregation chant,

―I‘ll never go back to Georgia‖ by 1957.93 Adding a politicized context to the piece,

Gillespie‘s ventures within Afro-Cuban style illustrated the rising trend of internationalism amongst black creative intellectuals who globally explored separate aesthetic threads to sonically convey the expressions of bop in an alternate musical context. Commenting on his concert work for members of the African Academy of Arts and Research with

American jazz and Cuban players, Gillespie stated that, ―Charlie Parker and I found the connections between Afro-Cuban and African music and discovered the identity of our music with theirs. Those concerts should definitely have been recorded, because we had a ball discovering our identity.‖94

The Subversive Content of Jazz and the Cold War Climate

Armstrong‘s internationally inspired counter-minstrel critique offered a glimpse of the developing discourse of the politically conscious global jazz icon of the Cold War era.

Armstrong‘s public critique, however, also solidified the just cause of the American government to monitor the artistic and political expressions of a number of black artists in

93 Shipton, Groovin' High 291-292. 153 both the national and international public eye. As Erenberg stated, ―over and over during the late 1940s and early 1950s, jazz musicians found their names splayed across the headlines of the daily newspaper, the gossip column, the jazz press.‖ Erenberg further posited on the tension of the era, stating that, ―if swing represented the rebirth of dreams, the post-war jazz world seemed stuck in a never-ending public nightmare.‖95 The activities of Cab Calloway and Lena Horne were monitored by the government in large part due to their personal associations with Communist or one-time Communist affiliated activists such as Benjamin Davis, A. Phillip Randolph and Paul Robeson. In a 1946 document entitled ―Foreign Inspired Agitation Among the American Negroes in the Chicago Field

Division,‖ the F.B.I. noted Calloway and Horne‘s participation in CP sponsored fundraisers, including a scheduled performance that celebrated ―Negro History Week.‖96

Calloway, noted for his sexually suggestive performances and direct references to drug use with his 1933 hit, ―Reefer Man,‖ was a prototypical target as the suspicion of illegal drugs, miscegenation, and Communist activity gave a probable cause to the covert monitoring of black artists.97 From the 1940s-1950s Calloway‘s movements were tracked by the F.B.I., and although a 1955 memo declared ―no evidence of CP membership, activity, or

94 Monson, ―Art Blakey‘s African Diaspora,‖332. 95 Erenberg, Swingin‟ the Dream, 241. 96 Federal Bureau of Investigation, ―Cab Calloway,‖ excerpted, Freedom of Information Privacy Act http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/cabcalloway.htm (accessed 25 September 2007). 97 In his analysis, Erenberg states that, ―in order to understand the public concern with the subversive impact of modern jazz, we need to examine the unraveling of the swing synthesis in bitterness and recrimination during the tension-filled post-war years.‖ Erenberg posits that governmental monitoring of jazz artists stemmed internally from ―the economic and cultural weaknesses of the dance band industry,‖ and the ―splintering of a united front‖ amongst critics, allowing for an ―attack on moral and political grounds.‖ However, Erenberg‘s thesis concentrates on how ―the music industry found itself caught up 154 sympathy,‖ the letter justified its monitoring due to the musician‘s expression of ―interest in racial equality and universal brotherhood.‖98

Originally recording as a jazz pianist, Nat King Cole pierced the walls of superstardom in the 1940s and 1950s as a vocalist entering the households of millions of

Americans, black and white, through radio, record, and eventually television. An international superstar as well, Cole toured Europe, Latin America, and the Far East in the early 1950s becoming arguably the most visible black icon of the period (Burns, p. 392).

Seen in part as a reaction to his celebrity as well as the lasting anger over the landmark

Brown v. Board decision, Cole was physically attacked by white supremacists that overtook the stage at an April concert in Birmingham Alabama in 1956.99 Publically brushing off the event, Cole was later criticized by black leaders such as Thurgood

Marshall for not vehemently, and publically denouncing his attack.100 Howard King

Cameron of the Daily Defender also stated that ―the attack easily could have been avoided,‖ claiming that ―when a man of Mr. Cole‘s fame and fortune lends credence to the

in the anti-Communist attacks on subversive New Deal radicalism in American entertainment.‖ Erenberg, Swingin‟ the Dream, 241-242. 98 Federal Bureau of Investigation, ―Cab Calloway,‖ excerpted, Freedom of Information Privacy Act http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/cabcalloway.htm (accessed 25 September 2007).

99 Federal Bureau of Investigation, ―Nat King Cole,‖ excerpted, Freedom of Information Privacy Act http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/natkingcole.htm (accessed 25 September 2007). 100 Cole was quoted as saying, ―Man, I love show business…but I don‘t want to die for it.‖ Burns and Ward, Jazz; A History of America‟s Music, 392. The attack also entered the public debate. In a letter to the editor of the Daily Defender, a reader stated, ―Nat King Cole is what I call a man. When he was attacked, he did not run to the NAACP. While Rev. King is safe in Harlem, Nat Cole is singing in the South…In the South, you fear the crackers and you outnumber them 6 to 1. The yellow streak leaves you when you come North to New York state.‖ ―Why Convict Cole?‖ Daily Defender, May 2, 1956, 11. 155 unlawful philosophy of the segregationists.‖101 Coming off a period of heightened racial tension in the South, including the recorded lynching‘s of eight black men in 1955, the signing of the ―Southern Manifesto‖ by senators and congressmen accusing the Supreme

Court of a ―clear abuse of judicial power‖ in the legal promotion of civil rights, and the reported enrollment of nearly 500,000 men and women to the White Citizen‘s Councils of

America, the attack on Cole was symptomatic of the augmented displays of racial turmoil circulating in the American South.102 The incident, however, led to Cole‘s eventual refusal to play in the Jim Crow south, influencing other black artists to exercise the agency of their celebrity in the midst of racist and minstrelized opposition.

Due to his worldwide exposure, Cole‘s professional and personal activities were closely monitored by the F.B.I. as early as 1945, after it appeared that Cole was a ―member of the Communist Party and the Communist Political Association during that period.‖

Although the file indicated that ―Cole may have dropped out of the CP movement since that period,‖ the F.B.I. continued to monitor Cole‘s suspected CP affiliation due to his membership to the Music Division of the Southern California Chapter of Arts, Sciences, and Professions Council—an organization identified as ―a Communist front by the

Congressional Committee on Un-American Activities.‖103 In addition, a letter to F.B.I.

Director James Edgar Hoover from a classified author in Reseda, California implored

Hoover to elaborate on the F.B.I.‘s knowledge of the subject, stating, ―For many years now my father has been telling me that ‗Nat King Cole,‘ is a Communist and that he is no good

101 Howard King Cameron, ―Cole Abetted Jim Crow,‖ Daily Defender, May 7, 1956, 11. 102 Burns and Ward, Jazz; A History of America‟s Music, 392. 156 and a disgrace to his country.‖104 Although the specific reasons for this accusation remain unclear, the letter was received as his celebrity became even more politicized as he took the stage on August 23, 1956 as a moderate voice in the developing storm of racial politics at the Republican National Convention. A natural choice due to his augmented celebrity,

Cole became even more visible in the public eye as the first African-American to be featured on his own radio and television program. The shows were quickly cancelled due to a lack of sponsorship; however, his breaking of the unofficial color boundary in television was significant for the overall cause of civil rights domestically and abroad, bringing forth a visible, globally renowned black icon to the mainstream.

The careful scrutiny placed upon jazz artists with youthful and worldwide appeal extended outside of the classified realm of the FBI. As the State Department embarked on its missions of propaganda with the Goodwill Tours, the halls of government sparred continuously over the strategy. Led by opposition from Representative John Rooney (NY) and Senator Allen Ellender (LA), various government officials questioned the legitimacy of these tours and condemned the American art as subversive as the very foreign governments

America was trying to reach with the tours.105 Von Eschen adds, ―for Rooney and

Ellender, to have bebop trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie representing the nation portended the end of the world as they knew it.‖106 Additionally, Barry Goldwater offered a stern critique

103 Federal Bureau of Investigation, ―Nat King Cole,‖ excerpted, Freedom of Information Privacy Act http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/natkingcole.htm (accessed 25 September 2007). 104 Federal Bureau of Investigation, ―Nat King Cole,‖ excerpted, Freedom of Information Privacy Act http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/natkingcole.htm (accessed 25 September 2007). 105 See the files from the House of Representatives 84th Congress, 2nd session, Part 2, 1956 found in Von Eschen, Satcmo Blows Up the World, 40-41. 106 Von Eschen, Race Against Empire, 165. 157 of the tours in a letter to the Assistant Secretary of State, Robert Hill, focusing on the decision to send Gillespie in lieu of a white children‘s musical troupe from his home state of Tucson, Arizona. Goldwater penned:

This particular item has reference to the recent tour of a Negro band leader, Dizzy Gillespie, which apparently involved an expenditure by the Federal Government of the outrageous sum of $100,839…Without any intention of criticizing you, I am wondering just what there is about a program of this type which would more properly fulfill the Government objectives in the area of cultural assistance to foreign countries as opposed to the excellent presentation offered by a group of young boys who have joined together for the purpose of contributing to the musical life of our country, and who have indicated a willingness to share these accomplishments with peoples abroad.107

These views had circulated in the halls of government for some time.108 In 1949, George

Dondero illustrated a widespread attack on Trotskyism, post-modern scholarship, socialist subversion, and of course, modern and avant-garde art as his records warned of ―the sinister conspiracy conceived in the black heart of Russia.‖109 In a letter from 1956, Dondero penned:

107 032 Tucson Kids Band/4-1957; General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59; National Archives at College Park (College Park, MD). 108 Richard M. Fried points to 1938 as the pivotal year for Anti-Communist sentiment in the U.S. government. Citing FDR‘s unsuccessful court-packing plan and the down strikes of 1937, conservatives were angered and the Democratic ranks began to split in Congress. Fried points out that that these events as well as the recession of 1937-1938 engaged a conservative coalition in congress and the unofficial union of Republicans and some Southern Democrats to block liberal measures in the government. As the New Deal came to a close the Special House Committee on Un-American Activities and other programs began to study and monitor political and artistic expressions of radicalism and by May 1938, Texas Congressman won the authority to investigate ―subversive and un- American propaganda.‖ Fried later cites Dies as an influence on Senator McCarthy who ―would pioneer in the methods of defamation and self-promotion,‖ that would characterize the McCarthy era. Richard M. Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 47. 109 Highlighted in Jane De Hart Mathews‘ piece, and found directly in the Congressional Records, 81st Congress, Session 1, 1949. However, the tours carried on as planned partially by the support of Hubert H. Humphrey who attacked the ―cowardice‖ of 158 Frankly, I do not understand some of the statements made by the President regarding to Museum of Modern Art. Modern art is a term that is nauseating to me. We are in complete accord in our thinking regarding this subject and its connection with communism. No one is attempting to stifle self expression, but we are attempting to protect and preserve legitimate art as we have always known it in the United States.110

By the early 1950s, artists from across the jazz community, as diverse as Duke

Ellington, Frank Sinatra, and Charlie Parker were accused publically of having Communist ties during the age of McCarthyism and fervent anti-Communist sentiment.111 With some musicians, both black and white labeled as ―Fellow Travelers‖ of the party and with many testifying before the House of Un-American Activities, conservative groups targeted jazz artists and the anointed cultural elite of Hollywood and New York as potential threats of subversion or propaganda under the laws of the United States.112 In effect, there were legitimate associative relations to be scrutinized between the CP and various jazz musicians, particularly those who carried party cards over the decades in order to strengthen their union ties, or in the case of Dizzy Gillespie who carried one ―because it was directly associated with my work.‖113 Ideologically speaking, the ties publically strengthened in the wake of WWII as musicians such as Charlie Parker and Gillespie

his governmental peers in censoring alternative dialogue concerning American foreign and domestic policy. Mathews, "Art and Politics in Cold War America," 771. 110 Found in, Mathews, "Art and Politics in Cold War America,‖ 775-78. 111 Erenberg, Swingin‟ the Dream, 241. 112 Erenberg cites the numerous occasions where jazz artists testified before the HUAC, claiming that ―the first inkling of trouble came in 1947 when Down Beat announced that a congressional subcommittee planned to subpoena ‗certain well known musicians and singers‘ for ‗being Communists,‖ citing the subsequent hearings of Sinatra, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman. Erenberg also cites the numerous arrests of jazz artists during the time of the HUAC hearings, notably Billie Holiday‘s arrest for heroin possession in 1949. Commenting on the political fervor of the era in relation to the government‘s crack-down on jazz, Holiday recalled, ―it was called ‗The United States of America versus Billie Holiday.‘ And that‘s just the way it felt.‖ Erenberg, Swingin‟ the Dream, 241-246. 159 became ―very much interested in the social order,‖ leading to ―these long conversations about it (Communism), and music.‖114

Transfixed by the myopic societal terms put into place through McCarthy‘s reincarnated ―Red Scare,‖ the expressed nationalism of the mainstream public called into question the agency, influence, and artistic content of jazz artists with both youth and world wide appeal. As jazz gained its footing on the foreign stage while drawing out a specified public discourse that vocally rallied against traditional minstrelized constraints and government sanctioned racial injustice, factions of the government drew stronger ties between jazz, Communism, and its potentially ―subversive impact‖ on the public.115

Uncovering this subversive setting and context within the art and community of jazz—from allegations of illegal drug use, illicit sex, interracial interaction, and possible Communist ties—the American government formalized its opposition to the production of modern black art through its various governmental controls. Within this conflation of artistic expression and radical politics, the 1950s milieu of minstrelsy is identified through overtly political terms as this reincarnation of the Red Scare under McCarthy and Hoover

113 Erenberg, Swingin‟ the Dream, 226. 114 Erenberg, Swingin‟ the Dream, 226. 115 Among the supporters, however, of the government sponsored trips were notable politicians such as Rep. Frank Thompson, Jr. (D-NJ), Sen. Javits, Senators Hubert Humphrey (D-Minn.), Rep. John Brademas (D-Ind.), and Senator Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.). In a 1955 article penned by Frank Thompson entitled, ―Are the Communists Right in Calling Us Cultural Barbarians?‖ Thompson states: ―if we have no respect for our own best cultural efforts, if we show no concern as a people and as a nation for our own contemporary culture and our living artists, then the peoples of other countries are hardly to blame if they ignore and are indifferent to the cultural contributions which we have to give the world. We have only ourselves to blame, for they take their cue from our own Federal Government. In this situation, the communist parties in various countries and the USSR find it extremely easy to spread their lies that we are gum-chewing, insensitive, materialistic barbarians.‖ Frank Thompson, ―Are the Communists Right in Calling Us Cultural Barbarians?‖ Music Journal (July-August 1955) 5. 160 marginalizes the expressive qualities and overall production of black artists and those connected to the communities of African-American artists. Taking notice of the public indictments was the jazz press, as Down Beat Magazine quipped that, ―the real threat to music today is not a red scare…it‘s a head scare.‖116 The submission to these societal anxieties though the use of conspicuous controls such as governmental monitoring and congressional debates uncovers the ethereal qualities of this re-configured milieu of minstrelsy. Generating a discourse of fear over the ―subversive‖ persuasion of foreign- based political ideology and artistic radicalism indicative of the European modernist tradition, the conspicuous controls placed to monitor and inhibit jazz‘s influence were put into motion as a result of the art form‘s emergent transnationalism and general calls towards cultural plurality on a global scale.

116 Erenberg, Swingin‟ the Dream, 245. 161 Chapter 4: “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down;” The Transitional Cultural Politics of Black Power Ideology, the “Free” Period, and the Post-Minstrel Jazz Identity.

The Modern Artist in the Post-Modern Scene

On July 2nd, 1964, Leonard Feather wrote a piece for Down Beat Magazine entitled,

―Miles and the Fifties,‖ and proclaimed jazz‘s top selling artist as ―a particularly suitable symbol‖ for the decade.1 Feather, a British born critic and part time pianist set out to provide a historical context for the vanguard musical happenings of the 1960s by specifically detailing the groundwork laid by Davis in the previous decade. From his arrival in the bop scene of New York in 1945, to his collaborations with classical arranger

Gil Evans by the late 1950s, the article provided a concise overview of Davis‘s career highlights, deliberately omitting details concerning his highly publicized vitriolic temper in favor of a piece that solidified his musical achievements and historically set place in the jazz scene. Focusing on the artist‘s innovations with improvisational technique and composition, Feather‘s piece solidified Davis‘s legacy as the primary musical and stylistic trendsetter of the more commercially mindful, sonically subdued, and mainstream accessible format of 1950s jazz. Written in the midst of a 1960s scene dominated by the cacophonous political and artistic strivings of black public intellectuals this chronological designation of Davis secured his public omission from the cultural happenings of the post- modern scene.

As the jazz of the 1960s began to outwardly speak towards a perspective of Black

Power, the work and endeavors of Miles Davis is commonly investigated from a cursory

1 Leonard Feather, ―Miles and the Fifties,‖ Down Beat Magazine 31, July 2, 1964, 45. 162 position outside of the emergent music of free jazz and the revolutionary sentiment seemingly embedded within the music. The purpose of this chapter will unfold to reveal the significance of Davis‘s musical and social influence in the 1960s as his public history, cultural endeavors, and sonic innovations drafted a defining narrative of Black Power.

Clarifying Davis‘s influence is not an attempt to subordinate the impact of the free jazz as younger musicians such as Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane emerged as the primary leaders of the sonic and ideological movement. However, an analysis of the cultural work of Davis in the late 1950s and 1960s establishes a standard for both the creative discourses and cultural identity of Black Power and provides a functional basis for the sonic templates explored by artists of the free period.

Though Davis navigated through a variety of musical genres over the course of his career, Feather‘s article specifically focused on his general influence within cool jazz, a branch stylistically defined by Davis but popularized by a number of white musicians who ushered the distinct genre into the dorm rooms and New York City lofts of white

Americans in the 1950s.2 Defined within this ―hipster‖ mold, Feather‘s focus was to

2 ―Cool‖ Jazz is often described as the ability to play certain sounds in a less rhythmically syncopated manner, in contrast to the ―hot‖ sounds also popular (particularly with whites) at the time. A musical movement dominantly associated with white musicians, Davis straddled the lines between cool jazz and the post-bop jazz of black Americans including hot jazz, influencing, critiquing, and dictating the aesthetics of the various genres through his unique compositions and improvisational techniques. Ina discussion of the racial context of the genres, Davis states: ―A lot of white musicians like Stan Getz, Chet Baker, and Dave Brubeck—who had been influenced by my records— were recording all over the place. Now they were calling the kind of music they were playing ―cool jazz.‖ I guess it was supposed to be some kind of alternative to bebop, or black music, or ―hot jazz,‖ which in white people‘s minds, meant black. But it was the same old story, black shit was being ripped off all over again.‖ Davis, Miles, 141. 163 locate Davis‘s innovations as distinctly ―modern,‖3 and artistically successive of the bop era—a musical era that defined the small band, highly improvised sonic landscape of the

1940s.4 Although Davis was quick to mention the influences for his innovations, Feather isolated Davis and proclaimed his artistry as the pivotal force in the establishment of a modernized response to the popular forms of jazz from the late 1940s and early 1950s.5

Feather states:

The trumpeter through the years had developed a style based largely on some aspects of his 1949-50 work. It involved a more frequent employment of mutes, substitution for the fuller-sounding flugelhorn for trumpet, a wispy and ethereal tone, sensitive use of pauses, and a generally lyrical sound and underplayed approach. The characteristic phrases of bebop, though never totally rejected, were dispensed with in many of the solos. 6

Whereas Duke Ellington‘s successive innovations were due to his harmonic reinterpretations of rhythm, Feather categorized Davis‘s ―lyrical‖ developments as a revision of melodic forms, utilizing muted horns and modal concepts to produce a

3 This term is applied given the exchanges during the interview. In one instance, Davis offers to Feather, ―Clark Terry was my main influence. I used to follow him around.‖ Feather responds, ―Terry was modern all along, wasn‘t he?‖ In another, Feather states, ―I guess these modern ideas were developing all over the place then. How did it reach the point where the whole bop thing became a fad? How and where did you decide to go from there?‖ Feather, ―Miles and the Fifties,‖ 46-47. 4 Specifically, through the assorted works of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, among other notables, including Davis. 5 Feather expands this concept in the article with an interview section, and Davis‘s slight disagreement over approach foreshadows my argument over the gradual shift in musical innovation: ―Feather: There are a lot of people who were probably playing flatted fifths, and other things Diz and Bird were identified with, even before Diz and Bird became famous. Davis: Certain clichés and half-steps they used to play—from the sixth to the flatted fifth. Feather: Wouldn‘t you say musicians in general were looking for something new to do? Davis: No, I think it just happened. Feather: You probably didn‘t play any style but your own, did you? You didn‘t start out playing like Roy (Eldridge), did you? Davis: I started out playing like anybody I could play like.‖ Feather, ―Miles and the Fifties,‖ 46. 164 ―sensitive,‖ sedated, and ―underplayed‖ melodic effect.7 Commenting on the pressing need for modal scales in jazz composition, Davis summarized by 1958 that:

The music has gotten thick, guys give me tunes and they‘re full of chords. I can‘t play them…I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of chords, and a return to emphasis on melodic rather than harmonic variation. There will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them.8

Davis‘s technique presented jazz‘s most liberating innovation since Ellington, signaling the end of an over-reliance on harmony, and presenting a workable approach towards expanding the melodic virtuosity explored in 1940s bop with the addition of modal scales. By exploring the modalities previously diagramed in his 1958 album

Milestones, Davis‘s sound by the mid to late 1950s was identified though a strict melodic discipline, juxtaposing foundational blues characteristics, post-bop sensibilities, and classically theorized notation, thus updating the field through a progressive approach to scalular analysis, and providing the basis for a number of the sonic templates explored by various free jazz musicians in the decades to come. Contemplating the complexities of this theoretical approach to music, Davis told his friend, composer George Russell that

―if Bird was alive, this would kill him.‖9 Through a reinstatement of previously arcane

6 Feather, ―Miles and the Fifties,‖ 48. 7 Davis comments that his 1959 album, Kind of Blue ―came out of the modal thing I started on Milestones. This time I added some other kind of sound I remembered from being back in Arkansas, when we were walking home from church and they were playing these bad gospels. So that kind of felling came back to me and I started remembering what the music sounded like and felt like. That feeling is what I was trying to get close to. That feeling had got in my creative blood, my imagination, and I had forgotten it was there.‖ Davis, Miles, 234. 8 Eric Nisenson, Open Sky: Sonny Rollins and his World of Improvisation (New York: Da Capo Press, 2000), 142. 9 Fred Kaplan, ―Kind of Blue: Why the Best Selling Jazz Album is So Great,‖ http://www.slate.com/id/2225336 (accessed 17 August 2009).

165 scalular modes into modern jazz, Davis‘s innovations, combined with the use of the horn mute worked to recalculate the sonic possibilities of jazz melody by essentially ―calming‖ the field in order to establish a new sonic paradigm for popular jazz in the 1950s to follow. ―When you go this way,‖ Davis further commented, ―you can go forever,‖ thus foreshadowing the musical approach of the jazz to come in the 1960s.10 The Feather quote identifies this technical approach and the innovative techniques employed by Davis to achieve this distinct sound. Ultimately, however, Feather‘s analysis worked to historically categorize Davis through his musical explorations as the ―sensitive‖ nature of his music represented the safe, mainstream oriented, modernist musical directions of the

1950s.11

Thematically, the article also emphasized how the perceived aesthetics of Davis and his music outlined the revitalized and commercially viable setting of the 1950s jazz scene.12 As cool jazz became the underground music of choice amongst the young intellectual elite of the nation, its popularity was due in part to its stylistic departures from the frenetic musicality expressed in the sound and style of the 1940s bop era.

10 Fred Kaplan, ―Kind of Blue: Why the Best Selling Jazz Album is So Great,‖ http://www.slate.com/id/2225336 (accessed 17 August 2009). 11 In his autobiography, Davis consistently presents a personalized counter- narrative to this sensitive musical approach, juxtaposing the aesthetic beauty of his art with the rage he felt concerning race relations and the discernment of his music on the art of white audiences. In 1955 Davis recalls an exchange with a affluent white festival organizer who made the mistake of referring to Davis as, ―the boy who played so beautifully.‖ When asked his name, Davis sharply replied, ―fuck you, and I ain‘t no fucking boy! My name is Miles Davis, and you‘d better remember that if you ever want to talk to me.‖ Davis, Miles, 191. 12 The Chicago Defender also categorized Davis as the most artistically and commercially viable artist in jazz, citing his affiliations ―with Broadcast music‖ and the licensing of the ―public performance of his compositions‖ as evidence of business savvy and overall position ―in the forefront of serious contemporary composers and musicians 166 Following Davis‘s iconic lead—from his firmly pressed Brooks Brothers suits and consistent employment of the latest jazz-inflected lingo—Feather highlights Davis as the personal and artistic embodiment of symbolic cool, epitomizing though his sound and individual style a personification of the genre‘s moniker.13 And through this representational analysis, critics and audiences alike began to discern his public visage as the seminal figure in the campaign of modern, authentic African-American music within the scene of the 1950s. Feather concludes his analysis, stating:

There will be no analysis here of the Miles Davis temperament. Too much has already been written, at the expense of discussions of musical facts and factors. Davis in short, represents restlessness and querulous doubt rather than riot and open rebellion, just as the lyricism of his solos, whether against a multitextured Gil Evans carpet of sounds or a quietly responsive rhythm section, is transmitted through a muted ball of fire more often than by an open horn. Both as a human being and as a musician, Miles in many ways was the symbol of the fifties, the decade of our discontent.14

In a manner similar to Duke Ellington in the 1930s, Davis‘s consistent display of modernized style and artistic innovation represented the changing course of music as well as the changing face of the black public creative intellectual. With numerous references to his ―light sound,‖ his integrated bands, as well as the constant reiteration of ―the clichés of bop,‖ Feather places Davis‘s innovations and persona within a fixed, chronologically specific context, instrumental to his era yet sonically static in the context of jazz in 1964. Categorically, Davis remained the iconic symbol of the ultra-hip jazz

who use jazz music as an idiom.‖ ―Credit Miles Davis with Shaping Modern Jazz Fad,‖ The Chicago Defender, March 21, 1959, 18. 13 Davis was routinely awarded prizes for his fashion sense, including the ―Fashion Personality of the Monty of May,‖ by Gentlemen‘s Quarterly. Said GQ, ―consistently declared the most popular trumpeter of our day, Miles Davis is perhaps also the best dressed man in the jazz world.‖ ―Miles Davis Named Fashion Personality,‖ Chicago Daily Defender, May 8, 1961, 16. 167 modernist in a decade of musical and social ―discontent.‖ However, this distinction was cast from a conspicuously post-modern era of artistic creativity and black political discourse.

In the very same July 2, 1964 issue of Down Beat Magazine, Don Heckman wrote an accompanying piece entitled, ―Ornette and the Sixties,‖ that featured the young saxophonist Ornette Coleman and his emergent brand of sonically progressive, post- modern music.15 Like Davis, Coleman was a musician schooled in a traditionally blues

14 Feather, ―Miles and the Fifties,‖ 51. 15 Although this term is not applied specifically to Coleman in this article, it is implied through the article‘s thesis which distinguishes Coleman from his musical predecessors and from the constant references to ―modern‖ jazz and a ―modern era‖ in which artists such as Davis ―modernized‖ bebop in the previous decade and era of musical exploration. Offering insight over the use of these themes of modernism and post modernism, bell hooks cites the common categorization of these terms in the context of African-American history, stating that, ―during the Sixties, black power movements were influenced by perspectives that could be easily labeled modernist,‖ yet adds that, ―despite the fact that black power ideology reflected a modernist sensibility, these elements were soon rendered irrelevant as militant protest was stifled by a powerful repressive ‗postmodern‘ state.‖ hooks‘s focus is to claim a sense of African-American control in the general discussion concerning postmodernism, specifying the common perception that, ―as a discursive practice it is dominated primarily by the voices of white male intellectuals and/or academic elites who speak to and about one another with coded familiarity.‖ Therefore in the quote above, the ―powerful repressive ‗postmodern‘ state,‖ were the forces of white domination that have consistently worked to silence the rebellious and radical forces presented by African-Americans. Critically focusing on themes of ―otherness and difference,‖ hooks‘ theoretical platform introduces postmodernism in a context of black identity, and declares the pressing need for a new postmodernist definition and ―Radical postmodernist practice,‖ that ―should incorporate the voices of displaced, marginalized, exploited, and oppressed black people.‖ Within this redefined rubric of postmodernist tradition, jazz is theorized as a projection of a crucial voice from the ―oppressed black people,‖ dealing with typical postmodern themes of criticism, valorization, and formal rejections of prior themes and traditions. And fitting this conception of the black postmodern Coleman‘s ―anti-jazz‖ marks a significant example as does Davis, who makes his own case stating, ―well, I‘ve changed music five or six times, so I guess that‘s what done.‖ Quotes taken from bell hooks, ―Postmodern Blackness‖ in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: a Reader, by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) p. 422-423. Davis quote taken from Davis, Miles, p. 381. 168 technique juxtaposed with the foundational harmonic components of bop and swing music, who eventually chartered out a distinct musical plane by the 1960s. Ensuring his place on the New York scene on the eve of the 1960s with his presciently titled landmark albums

Something Else and The Shape of Jazz to Come, Coleman became widely heralded throughout the decade as the progenitor of the emergent free jazz movement by a number of critics and musicians alike. In the Heckman piece, Coleman‘s artistry is detailed systematically—eschewing a debate over the notated interpretations of the music and stylistic presentation of its musicians in favor of arguing that Coleman‘s music was a refraction of the previous decade‘s mainstream oriented modernist musical approach.

Thus, the focus of Heckman‘s piece is to classify Coleman as a reinvention of jazz through the jazz artist—relevant to the distinctly political times and serving as a sonic narrator for the socially and artistically fluctuating era. Heckman states:

It is perhaps a truism to suggest that an artist reflects his society, but surely there was a rare social and artistic unanimity in the feelings of anticipation and ferment that characterized the opening days of the decade. When John F. Kennedy said, ―Let us go out to all the world that the torch has been passed to a new generation,‖ the echoes rang with shattering authority in the world of jazz. Undoubtedly the single most influential jazz figure in this respect was saxophonist Ornette Coleman.16

The Heckman feature relies on similar devices to that of the Feather article, identifying Coleman as a sonic avatar that symbolized his younger generation‘s seemingly restless focus on artistic and societal issues. The Heckman article also illustrates the artistry of Coleman as not only symptomatic to the radicalism of the times, but as a solution to the lingering musical parameters, quandaries, and indeed ―clichés,‖ of the prior era. The two articles, however, present a sharp theoretical contrast between the two artists that

169 extends past the basic dissimilarities of subject and decade. Theoretically distinguishing the two articles is the method in which societal issues are addressed in relation to the artistic components of the music. In Feather‘s account, Davis‘s pursuit of detailing

―musical facts and factors‖ opts to dispel the potential impact of ―riot and rebellion‖ so present in the Heckman piece, relegating Davis‘s artistry and legendary vitriolic

―temperament‖ as negligible, ―muted‖ factors in an analysis of his cultural influence.17

Feather‘s account also leads the reader towards the overwhelming summation that the

―discontent‖ of the 1950s pertains exclusively to Davis‘s own ―restless‖ search for musical solutions rather than through the documented, consistent, and unabashedly critical analysis of race, racism, and artistry in jazz and American culture expressed freely and publically by

Davis at the height of his popularity. And in addition to Davis‘s structural revisions that worked to establish the melodic template for much of the hard bop and free jazz expressions of the 1960s, his uncompromisingly critical and highly publicized evaluation of music and American culture helped set the standard for the creative discourse and physical identity of the Black Power era of the 1960s.

By the 1960s, Miles Davis, the seasoned veteran of the jazz scene, now in his early forties, and by far the genre‘s most commercially successful musician found himself artistically and socially relegated to the role of an outsider—deemed by an array of critics and his younger musical peers as an extraneous and often negligible force in the scope of

16 Don Heckman, ―Ornette and the Sixties,‖ Down Beat Magazine 31, July 2, 1964, 60. 17 Ashley Kahn argues against this position specifically: ―What was controversial to white audiences carried positive significance in the black community. For a black man of Miles‘s stature to adopt an intransigent, uncompromising public posture was uncommon in the 1950‘s. His quiet but determined sense of self in a society bristling with racial 170 the post-modern, politically charged jazz scene of the 1960s.18 Conversely, Heckman‘s depiction of Coleman solidified his position as a ―relevant‖ force, merging his vanguard artistic sensibilities with the general ethos, rhetoric, and activism displayed in the nationalist agenda of the Black Power Movement. Heckman also comments on the associate players of Coleman‘s generation:

Jazzmen were concerned with…freedom…and the increased militancy of the civil rights movement was reflected by a growing aggressiveness in the music of many of the younger Negro jazz players.‖19

Heckman‘s article posits Coleman and his generational musical peers as politicized forces germane to the present civil rights agenda, sonically illustrating the concerns of racial freedom and equality through an expression of militancy, power, and nationalistic ideals in their music.20 And as a result of this classification, the artistry and public visage of Miles Davis was cast in a staunchly apolitical manner as the articles categorize the artist as an obsolete force in the context of the post-modern politically charged era of the

1960s.

The 1960s were defined transitionally in the cultural history of jazz as the musically progressive ―free‖ period presented the most publically blatant connection between music and politics in the genre‘s history. Analyzing the genre, Ted Gioia hints

tension offered fellow African-Americans an example.‖ Ashley Kahn, Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece (New York: Da Capo Press, 2001), 59-60. 18 As the free and avant-garde jazz scene gained in popularity an assortment of artists, including pianist Cecil Taylor, openly mocked Davis‘s artistic contributions, stating bluntly, ―he (Davis) plays alright, for a millionaire.‖ Davis, Miles, 251. 19 Heckman, ―Ornette and the Sixties,‖ 59. 20 Detailing the trend of this perspective, Scott Saul explains the ―explorations of a soul aesthetic in jazz‖ as ―more militant,‖ concluding that music‘s designs to ―explore black pride and black identity‖ and ―challenge‖ the assumptions, powers, and minstrelized constraints of a ―white dominated society.‖ Scott Saul, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain‟t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 9. 171 again at this popular paradigm of established musical protest, assembling jazz‘s tenable association with the ethos espoused through the radical politics of black literary and activist figures exclusively in the 1960s. Gioia‘s examination signals this symbiotic engagement, stating:

It is impossible to comprehend the free jazz movement of these same years without understanding how it fed on (the) powerful cultural shift in American society. Its practitioners advocated much more than freedom from harmonic structures or compositional forms—although that too was an essential part of their vision of jazz. Many of them saw their music as inherently political. They saw that they could, indeed must, choose between participating in the existing structures—in society, in the entertainment industry in the jazz world—or rebelling against them. The aesthetic could no longer be isolated from these cultural currents.21

The attention paid to the politicized markings of this cultural shift were due to the critical perception of jazz in the 1950s, as Davis and other musicians employing post-bop

―clichés‖ were categorized by a marketable, socially palatable, and racially sanitized sound that seemingly deflected the ever-present demand for social, political, and racial change in the African-American community. Alongside the momentum of the free jazz movement, Gioia, along with Feather and Heckman presciently identify this transitional shift in jazz history, as the explosive musical identity of Coleman and others translated the newly bold, vocalized, and assertive tactics of liberation expressed through the publically revolutionary ethos of the Civil Rights era. These analyses come towards a logical conclusion, presenting a marked shift that transitioned jazz into an overtly politicized art form, converged within the radical oratory, literary, and sonic realm of the

1960s.

21 Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 338. 172 However, embedded in the language that describes this transition is a notion of unexpected, abrupt change. From Heckman‘s citations of the new ―concerns‖ of

―jazzmen‖ in the 1960s, in concert with Gioia‘s analysis of jazz ―advocating‖ a state of

―rebellion,‖ a crisis is described where jazz artists became compelled to represent the radical politics and ―cultural currents‖ indicative of their era. In other words, the inevitable reaction of the post-modern free jazz artist was to signify a distinction against the norms and boundaries presented in the artistic works of the previous decade. This sharp transition, however, is more accurately defined as a gradual shift, instituted in the artistic conscious in large part by the very artist deemed irrelevant in this post-modern environment—Miles Davis. In his analysis of ―Black Power Studies,‖ Peniel E. Joseph makes a similar claim concerning the debates over the transitioning cultural politics of the era. Placing the study of Black Power, ―within the broader context of American and

African American history at the local, national, and international level,‖ Joseph concludes that, ―Black Power is too often portrayed as a temporary eruption that existed outside the confines of American history,‖ further claiming that this summation, ―is as unfortunate as it is ill considered.‖22 Arguing against the commonplace assertions of the movement‘s spontaneous and ―temporary‖ outbreak, Joseph provides a context for the transitional role of Davis in the era of black power and free jazz. As the iconic and sonic legatee of Duke

Ellington, Davis remains the primary conduit for the transformations explored in 1960s jazz. Evidenced by his unwavering commitment to progressive music and his adoption of an empowered racialized identity, Davis‘s work guided his own attempts to destroy the

22 Peniel E. Joseph, ―Historians and the Black Power Movement,‖ OAH Magazine of History, Vol. 22 (July 2008): 8-9.

173 minstrelized boundaries presented to him in the artistic and social climate of post-war

America.

Indeed, an historical account of Miles Davis contradicts the dominant discursive assertions made in these primary and secondary analyses. Along with his numerous sonic innovations that continued to be utilized throughout the 1960s, Davis served as the most publically viable embodiment of the post-minstrel, nationalistic identity inherent of the era of Black Power ideology. This is not to suggest that Davis was the sole proprietor of this representation, as an array of artists contributed to the numerous public displays of this politicized, creative identity. However, this assertion does recognize his prevalent influence, setting the stage for a number of his generational peers and former sidemen to validly contribute to the display of nationalist ideals within this burgeoning, post WW2 jazz identity.

Essentially, Davis served as a key representation of these ideals, remaining outside the field of free jazz, yet integrally linked to the musical characterizations of

Black Power sentiments championed in the scene. This chapter, therefore, locates

Davis‘s work as the emergent example of this new jazz identity, charting how Davis existed as a physical, intellectual, and creative manifestation of this identity through his relevant vanguard artistry, outspoken personal style and nature, and persistently public critique of hegemonic social controls within the music industry and American mainstream culture. In citing Davis‘s cultural and artistic importance in the 1960s, the music of the post-modern period is clarified as well the various nationalist-based traits that comprise of the post-minstrel identity of the era. This chapter will also chart those effected by this influence and will identify the gradual shift in jazz that formalized its

174 association to the post-minstrel, black power ideologies of the 1960s. Alongside a number of his generational post-bop peers, Davis served as an efficient witness to the jazz scene, as well as African-American social politics, and mainstream public culture.

From this vantage point, Davis and his peers presented an uncompromising stance against racism and the minstrelized identities that dictated the scope, depth, and range of African-

American cultural production. And from this position, Davis forged the most public example of musical and cultural influence within the genre, contributing to the more overtly political identities of various musicians of the era yet maintaining an artistic and social persona that sonically and culturally projected the aesthetic, masculine agency of black power.

As mentioned, this chapter situates Davis as the most notable legatee of Ellington, whereas in spite of their mutual eschewing of ostensible politics, their cultural output retained a distinct societal resonance that projected a discernable politicized narrative from both their artistic endeavors and meditations on art and culture. The focus of this dissertation follows this discourse—analyzing the politicized framework in which jazz and its artists are inexorably linked to promote an argument that jazz and the music, performance, and discourse surrounding it is an inherent and unflinchingly political discursive practice amongst African-Americans, creating a discernable intellectual sphere for creative intellectuals to project definitive public displays of radicalism against their minstrelized surroundings. The initial pages of this chapter brings these concepts into focus as a line of demarcation was inevitably drawn by the dominant scholarship on jazz to reason how fluctuations in the music, in chronological correspondence with the era, represented the new political directions and changing social politics of blacks in the

175 1960s. This chapter, however, adjusts this common notion, suggesting instead that the overtly political expressions within jazz during the civil rights period was the result of its own storied influence, detailing the gradual shift from Marxism to Black Nationalism, bop to free and a counter-minstrel identity to a post-minstrel jazz identity.

Finally, this chapter will situate how jazz entered and engaged in this publically politicized era, deconstructing its minstrelized boundaries and Marxist associations towards an art form that often reflected the broader tenants of a racially empowered, nationalist based agenda. In doing so, this chapter will argue that the artists producing and effected by the various strands of the emergent free jazz and post-bop movements represented the summation of the central dictum of jazz, established in 1935 by Duke

Ellington—to consistently revise its sonic format for the purpose of maintaining a relevant social, cultural, and political functionality. Thus, this chapter posits that the jazz of the 1960s reflected this socially revisionist effort, creating a politicized narrative within the art that refracts the dominant discourse that omits the influence of Davis and others from the so-called modern period. Indeed, the point of definition in this revision remains Davis; however, close attention will also be paid to his broad influence, as his sonic influence chartered a tenable course for black public creative intellectuals in the

1960s. In describing these complex associations, this chapter will introduce the transition from the post-Harlem creative intellectual to the post-minstrel creative black thinker that emerged in the period to combat the pervasive racist logic and discourse of minstrelsy

176 utilizing various creative, musically centered outlets to provide a functional discourse to counter the politics of racism.23

Gradual Shifts in Black Politics and the Culture of Minstrelsy

The gradual shift towards a more overtly politicized music gained momentum alongside the increasingly public efforts of militant factions within the Civil Rights

Movement. The conspicuously political stamp placed upon jazz came in spite of the public re-evaluation of Marxist-associated thought and Communist activity amongst black public intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s. By the mid 1950s, the Communist party was left for dead after the debilitating effects of McCarthyism and decades of party infighting amongst the ranks.24 The nationalist aspirations of black public intellectuals, publically present since the early days of Garvey, further weakened the party‘s communal influence as the growing mistrust of a ―color-blind party and a color-blind revolution,‖ strengthened the nationalist-based Black Power ideology that re-asserted its social agenda as a result of the power vacuum produced from the pressures of the McCarthy era.25 Ideologically, the rhetorical influence of Marxism and the activism of Communist politics dissipated amongst

African-American intellectuals, bringing into question the temerity of the party‘s unfulfilled declarations of ―Self-Determination,‖ the ―Negro Nation,‖ and the ―Negro

23 See Chapter one, footnote number four for a description of Lott‘s analysis of minstrelsy‘s ―racist logic.‖ See Lott, , Love and Theft, 36. 24 Hutchinson states, ―the Communist Party was now an outcast in America, left alone to feed on its own isolation with enemies too powerful to strike out at.‖ Hutchinson, Blacks and Reds, 215. 25 Hutchinson, Blacks and Reds, 215. 177 Question.‖26 Through alienating tactics that shunned black leaders outside of the party and adhering only to ―civil rights struggles which were led by those who agreed with us on foreign policy,‖ the nationalist, race-based political aspirations of African-Americans found a new radical voice outside of the party and within the wide net cast by the Civil Rights

Movement.27

In the wake of the numerous social atrocities experienced during the struggle for

Civil Rights in the 1950s and 1960s, the Communist Party—which had championed its historic connection to African-Americans through its mutual struggles in Scottsboro, its support in anti-lynching reform, and the decisive claim of being the ―party of the Negro people,‖—lost its footing amongst African-Americans due to its inability to engage with the emergent brand of radical, racialized politics resulting from the Cold War period.28

26 During the age of Jim Crow and Cold War sponsored societal controls, moderate African-Americans publicized their progress in the cause of equality outside of the political rubric of Communism, and in spite of the violent, segregated racial climate of the 1950s. With the highly publicized, landmark victories ranging from Brown v. Board in 1954, the Alabama bus boycotts of 1956, and the widespread acts of civil disobedience in face of segregation, the channel of democracy became an increasingly viable option for radical, progressive racial change in America. Alongside the victories, however, came violent backlash to these democratic reforms. The opposition to African-American progress was an attempt to protect the prosperity and social dominance in the segregated nation. The vocalized, political adamancy of segregationists clearly signified the fervent nationalism that protected the hegemonic social controls of white prosperity, power, and influence. However, it was also this branch of obtained nationalism that assisted in the creation of alternative, non-conformist, and radically intellectual black progressive protest in the post- WW2 era. 27 Hutchinson, Blacks and Reds, 232. 28 From the moderate integrationist practices of the NAACP, to the youth-driven empowerment strategies of SNCC, to the overt militancy of the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers, the focus of black unity and domestic racial politics obscured the message and influence of Communists, as the alternative political sphere offered through Communist affiliation and Marxist centered thought began to disappear in the advent of a Black Nationalist ideological agenda. Along similar lines, James Smethurst argues: ―Some intellectuals who had left or been expelled from the CPUSA…like Harold Cruse, were veterans of the cultural wing of the Communist Left had become more or less hostile to the 178 Amongst black intellectuals still tied to the Communist Party, in party fighting continued as longstanding black Communist Cyril Briggs issued massive critiques against the party‘s attack of Black Nationalism and its accusation of ideologically ―feed(ing) the white chauvinism‖ of the bourgeois, capitalist masses of 1960s American culture. Incidentally, former black Communist and Marxist-associated intellectuals played a significant role in the construction of a Black Nationalist ideology.29 Briggs‘s critique of the ―bourgeoisie

Negro‘s‖ of the NAACP situated the group as ―token integrationists,‖ thus accrediting the growing proclamations espoused through Black Nationalism, ―with its advocacy of black self-assertion…evoking the fear and hatred of the white ruling class.‖30 Presciently, Briggs observed, ―the veritable mushrooming of Negro nationalist groups,‖ but was unable to bridge the classist ideologies and foreign agenda of Communism with the publically paramount domestic concerns of race and social agency, indicative of Black Nationalism.31

The break from Communism signified the growing ideological crisis that permeated the discursive field of black public intellectuals in the 1960s. Defined by the pressing urgency of immediate societal empowerment, this crisis unfolded to the public from the diverse and often conflicting ideological strategies engaged in the pursuit of black freedom.

Old Left—though in many cases, such as Cruse‘s, this hostility was not entirely public until the Black Power Movement had clearly begun to emerge.‖ James Smethurst, ―The Rise of Black Arts,‖ in Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States, edited by Bill V. Mullen and James Smethurst (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 265. 29 Hutchinson, Blacks and Reds, 237. 30 Hutchinson, Blacks and Reds, 238. Maurice Isserman‘s chapter ―Toward a New Left,‖ details the transition from strict Marxist politics towards a broad, progressive Left, particularly among the nation‘s youth involved in the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement. See Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 171-220. 31 Hutchinson, Blacks and Reds, 237. 179 An influence on the architects of Black Power, Harold Cruse‘s critical 1968 analysis The

Crisis of the Negro Intellectual provided the seminal voice against Communist involvement in African-American communities. In a restructured era of black intellectual public discourse, slowly divorcing from the enforced marginalities presented through

McCarthyism, yet still in consideration of Marxist-inspired thought, Cruse‘s work served as the intellectual antithesis to Black ideological strategies ingrained in Marxism, placing an argument against Communist and Socialist activity, specifically in broad relations with

African-American societal, cultural, artistic, and identity politics. Marking claims of corruption, specifically in its designation of a racialized platform to propel its political agenda, Cruse was among a number of former notable Communist black intellectuals

(Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison included) who became enormously critical of the allegedly seductive intellectual hold and ideological monopoly presented through the rhetoric and practice of Marxism. Cruse proclaims the ―native American social dynamic,‖ of African-Americans, and positions Marxism as a foreign misinterpretation of the

―American Negro‘s social role,‖ further declaring a reorganization of capitalism through black nationalistic channels as an advantageous maneuver for African-Americans.32 Cruse surmises, ―it is on this score that the American Marxists have, for over 40 years, misled, disoriented, and retarded Negro intellectuals.‖33 Cruse‘s critique on Communism cites precedence from the historical ―failures‖ in African-American communities since before the Depression, but also clearly denotes the urgency amongst black public intellectuals of the 1960s to finalize their renouncement of Marxist politics in order to ensure the path of

32 Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 262. 33 Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 262. 180 ―ethnic democratization of the American society‖ to capitalize on the ―unique developments of American Capitalism,‖ now available to African-Americans.34

Cruse‘s analysis represents a strand of thought eventually freed from the perceived

―dogma‖ of Marxism—discursively outlining a path towards the ―inner dialectic‖ of black power ideology, Cruse‘s analysis defines black power for the masses, representing the dynamic sense of urgency and anger expressed by black radicals invested in black social freedom. Its delivery and discernment through conflicting, a-historic, and often contradictory means, potentially represents the gamut of human emotion and allows for the formation of an ―inner dialectic,‖ forging an intellectual and expressionistic space free from

Marxist ―dogma‖ and engaged with broader notions of social, cultural, political, and aesthetic freedom afforded through nationalist-based Black Power ideology. Cruse‘s analysis astutely points to the ―crisis‖ as a pressing ideological concern amongst black public intellectuals of the era. His political and cultural concerns though, give credence to the gradual shifts in black politics as his former Communist association positions his analysis as a bridge between pre and post generations, channeling his definitions of Black

Power ideology from a historically fluid perspective.

Echoing this sentiment, Black Arts Movement public intellectual Larry Neal conceptualized the ―new space‖ afforded by this transition, envisioning an idyllic sphere outside of a specifically Marxist domain and structured by the very social and cultural freedoms espoused through black power. Neal comments:

34 Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 188. Cruse adds: ―Pro-nationalist Negro trends must reject Marxist-Communism, and vice versa, because the latter, being theoretically opposed to independent black political power on internationalist premises, must seek to control nationalist trends by directing them into integrationist channels. This has been historically demonstrated.‖ Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 263. 181 About 1962, many young blacks began to seek another direction, one that they believed would more militantly set about achieving true freedom for black people. These were primarily urban youth who had recognized the need for action, but were decidedly alienated from the movement in the South. Some had been involved with the radical white left where, in the process of reading Marx and Lenin, they came to realize that despite the importance of these theoreticians to late nineteenth and early twentieth century revolutionary thought, they were still confronted with the necessity of developing their own theories of social change. As a result of this observation, they found themselves squeezed between the pallid liberalism of the integrationists and the pseudo-jargon of the white left. Therefore, they had to turn inward on their most immediate historical experiences in order to construct a meaningful concept of social change.35

Within this new space, Neal offers a platform of Black Power ideology and presents this ideological format as a solution to the limitations of Marxist oriented thought amongst black public intellectuals. What Neal‘s analysis imagines, in line with the popularized utopian sentiments of black power, was a space that incorporated the autonomous political and economic strategies indicative of Black Nationalism—but ultimately, a space that celebrated and projected the aesthetics of African-American cultural tradition.

Cruse identified this black radicalism as part of ―what the Negro‘s allies feared most of all,‖ prophetically offering that the political and cultural failures of Marxist ideology would awake ―this sleeping, dream-walking black giant.‖36 As the cultivated nationalist ideologies of Black Power fed from the failures of Marxist thought, this proposed sphere functioned as a safe space, fostering and projecting the gamut of anger and desperation experienced by African-Americans in the minstrelized climate of American society.

Within these spaces, Neal also offers a platform free from the minstrelized,

―Euro-Western sensibility,‖ that, as Useni Eugene Perkins remarked, ―has enslaved, oppressed, and niggerized black people since the merciless slave ships first began

35 Larry Neal, ―New Space: The Growth of Black Consciousness in the Sixties,‖ in Black Seventies, edited by Floyd B. Barbour, (Boston: Porter Sargent Pub., 1970), 15. 182 shanghaiing our ancestors from Africa to America.‖37 Indeed, crucial to the formation of these spaces was the ―challenge and responsibility‖ of converging radical, authentic black art within the discursive template of Black Power ideology. Perkins remarks that, ―the

Black Arts Movement cannot afford to isolate itself from the Black Revolution,‖ quoting

Neal that black radical art is ―the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept.‖38 Cruse‘s work also offers an assertive analysis of minstrelsy‘s numerous effects on African-American culture, angled primarily through a critique of the Marxist centered politics and historic failures of the ―superficial Negro creative intelligentsia,‖ to resourcefully counter the cultural, political, and economic oppression experienced by blacks in a racist American environment.39 Drawing upon jazz as a ―perfect symbol of the Negro creative artist‘s cultural denial, degradation, exclusion, exploitation and acceptance of white paternalism,‖ Cruse cites how the process of minstrelsy operated systematically, presenting ―white control of cultural and creative power patterns‖ of black art under an overall minstrelized system, ―established to the supreme detriment of blacks.‖40

36 Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 184. 37 Neal, ―New Space,‖ 87. Perkins is a poet, playwright, public activist with the Black Arts Movement. 38 Neal, ―New Space,‖ 87. 39 Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 104. Cruse indictment also includes a reference to the film Porgy and Bess and its popularity amongst African-Americans as an example of ―working-class Negroes lin(ing) up at the box offices to see this colorful film ‗stereotype of their people.‖ Cruse concludes that, ―this whole episode revealed some glaring facts to substantiate my claim that the Negro creative intellectuals does not even approach possession of a positive literary and cultural critique—either of his own art, or that other art created for him by whites.‖ (P. 102) Cruse eventually declares that ―Porgy is surely the most contradictory cultural symbol ever created in the Western world.‖ Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 103 40 Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 103-104. 183 Cruse establishes minstrelsy as a template for these cultural and political ―power patterns‖ and cites the failures of leadership amongst black public intellectuals from the

1920s to the mid sixties to expose this minstrelized paradigm and the various works of white cultural critics such as Gilbert Seldes for their marginalizing racial assertions.41

Cruse cites these failures, stating that ―they (the ―black intelligentsia,‖) are not aware that for critics like Seldes, the Negroes were the anti-intellectual, uninhibited, unsophisticated, intuitive children of jazz music who functioned with aesthetic ‗emotions‘ rather than with the disciplined ‗mind‘ of white jazzmen.‖42 Cruse concludes by summarizing the complete limitations offered to black public intellectuals within the encompassing realm of minstrelsy, charging that younger generations ―must first clear the way to cultural revolution by a critical assault on the methods and ideology,‖ presented by the mediators of minstrelsy, from white cultural critics, ineffectual black leaders and Marxist-oriented

―old –guard Negro intellectual elites.‖43 Cruse states, ―Thus every Negro artist, writer, dramatist, poet, composer, musician, et al, comes under the guillotine of this cultural judgment.‖ Cruse concludes, ―what this judgment really means is that the Negro is artistically, creatively, and culturally inferior; and therefore, all the established social power wielded by the white cultural elite will be used to keep the Negro creative artist in his place.‖44 Evidenced from these statements, the works of Neal, Cruse, and Perkins present the platform and ―new space‖ of Black Power ideology as a solution to

41 Cruse draws mainly upon Seldes‘ analysis of Amos „n‟ Andy, claiming that Seldes‘, ―critiques of American art forms damned the Negro with faint praise, condemning him forever to the back alleys of American culture.‖ Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 97. 42 Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 104. 43 Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 99-102. 44 Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 105. 184 minstrelsy, creating, ―a functional esthetic that expresses the total black experience,‖ and serving as a total rejection of the supposed Marxist buttressing of a minstrelized

American culture.

Free Jazz and the Gradual Deconstruction of the Minstrel Milieu

By the late 1950s, Davis‘s sonic experiments with modal scales became a marker of what avant garde saxophonist Anthony Braxton would refer to as ―restructuralism‖ within jazz, reflecting both the urgency towards employing melodic innovation and the general dissatisfaction felt by jazz musicians with the artistic practice of bop.45 Although characterized as an uninhibited style of music, known specifically for its frenetic rhythmic pace and complex improvisations, the compositional emphasis of bop

(regardless of genre, be it bebop, hard bop, etc) still commonly relied on the ridged

45 Restructuralism as term is used here from the perspective of saxophonist and composer Anthony Braxton who‘s ―restructuralist‖ or radical modernist articulated, as Robert Radano explains, the ―expressions that vigorously exerted an intellectual vanguardism.‖ This term operates as a reaction to current trends and displays of art without regard to genre, emerging and re-emerging in order to restructure an artistic environment. Ronald M. Radano, New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton‟s Cultural Critique (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 74. Historically, many of restructuralists came of age during the bebop movement of New York in the 1940‘s which was built primarily upon the concepts of the Kansas City jazz movement by scaling down the traditional orchestra into smaller units and instituting individual improvisation as the primary method of musical composition. The movement was established by the various environmental dynamics of the re-emerged New York scene. Ross Russell, Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973), 196. And according to Scott and Rutkoff, ―World War II had cleared the way for fundamental change in music and race relations. Bebop‘s determination to take jazz back from white swing bands and to secure full credit and reward coincided with other African-American efforts to end American apartheid.‖ The music also signified the era of individual musical artistry and the radicalized environment of New York proved to be conducive to the rapid, chromatic, and highly improvised sounds of the ―modern‖ jazz musicians. By the 1950s and 1960s, Braxton applied this term ―principally to…Coleman, but also to Braxton‘s earlier 185 harmonic structures explored in Swing that relegated the soloist to both a chord-based arrangement and the prearranged melodic ―lead‖ or ―head‖ as the starting points of improvisation.46 Frustrated by this cumbersome harmonic structure, Davis‘s modal style popularized the playing of songs without chord changes in the traditional sense, employing scalular (thus, melodic) modes that issued forth a tonal field for improvisation.47 In other words, the use of modes allowed for a strong tonal center to each musical piece, granting musicians an ability to improvise in a predetermined key without the usual structural resolution and harmonic boundaries found in the chromatic harmonies of bop.

The music of Ornette Coleman relied on the compositional foundations provided through modal techniques, developing a ―harmelodic‖ approach to reorganize the jazz field so densely structured in traditional chordal harmony. Coleman‘s harmelodic music, like the modal approach of Davis, generally worked with a stated key and tonal center, but was characterized by an ability to musically function over different tonal centers at

favorites…Paul Desmond…who recast jazz…into a new racially confused dialogic.‖ Scott and Rutkoff, New York Modern, 260-261. . 46 The past radical innovations found in post WWII bebop jazz specifically expressed the desire amongst black artists to combat minstrelsy by refuting the claims of African-American creative inferiority, as well as the assertions that black artistic and intellectual culture had simply imitated white expression. As Ronald Radano states, ―the most creative, the most spiritually enlightened musicians, regardless of genre or idiom, devised the most inventive (musical) phrasing. They were the true innovators or, once again, the ‗restructuralists.‖ Radano, New Musical Figurations 18 47 Due in part to the individualized and persistently innovative musicality of the genre, bebop itself was subject to a variety of adaptations. Eric Porter in his essay entitled, ―Dizzy Atmosphere: The Challenge of Bebop,‖ adds a societal context to the apparent problems of bebop. ―Despite the social and creative freedoms that bebop promised, many African-American musicians eventually concluded it had become symbolic of the creative and social restrictions facing them. By the end of the 1940‘s bebop represented both challenges to and the constraints of jazz as an art form and commodity.‖ Eric Porter, 186 anytime during a piece. Eschewing a piano, guitar, or other traditional ―chord-based‖ instruments that laid down the harmony of a song, Coleman‘s music was formatted over the improvisations of the soloist, bassist, and drummer. With harmelodics, chords were introduced by the musical tonic but not actually played, as improvisational melodies from non-chordal instruments provided the total tonal and sonic structures of a piece.48 As

Coleman‘s radical approach engaged the jazz scene, Bassist Ron Carter remarked on the significance of Coleman‘s emergence, applying a musical and societal perspective to his arrival.

Whenever there has been a major change in jazz, there‘s been a major change in everything else afterward. It‘s incredible how it happens. Freedom music to me represents the younger musicians getting tired of the establishment. The establishment to me is chord progressions and a thirty-two bar form.49 The student radicals are like the freedom jazz players who want to bypass most of the present standards for playing a tune…In 1959, when Ornette Coleman hit New York, he predicted the social changes musically.50

Coleman‘s arrival and the advent of free jazz was widely heralded as the most significant event in music since the emergence of bebop nearly two decades before. Jazz historian Bill

Cole commented on the importance of his arrival, but also of the divisive quality of his emergent musical influence. Cole states:

There were, especially during the early part of the 1960‘s, two camps of jazz lovers developing simultaneously. One camp was submerged in the hard bop of the 1950‘s. The other had just as much love for that tradition but was also vanguarding the music represented by Ornette Coleman and his followers.51

―Dizzy Atmosphere: The Challenge of Bebop,‖ American Music 17, no. 4 (Winter, 1999): 438. 48 The tonic is the first note of a musical scale. 49 These are the central components of bebop and bop music. 50 Robert K. McMichael, ―We Insist—Freedom Now!‘: Black Moral Authority, Jazz, and the Changeable Shape of Whiteness,‖ American Music 16, no. 4 (Winter, 1998): 397. 51 Bill Cole, John Coltrane (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2001), 7. 187 Coleman‘s opposition consisted mainly of his seasoned peers who viewed his music as the antithesis of bop, lacking proper structure, tonal musicality, and overall form.52 Jon Hendricks was quick to point out his appreciation for Coleman‘s character,

―for whom I have the utmost respect,‖ but was also vehement in his disdain for critics who viewed Coleman‘s artistry as the prophetic link to bebop progenitor Charlie Parker.

Hendricks declares that ―to call Ornette Coleman an extension of Bird (Parker), to me is charlatanism of the rankest order.‖53 Others felt even more strongly about Coleman‘s music and did not share Hendricks‘s approval of Coleman‘s overall intentions. David Ake states:

Coleman‘s music of this time quickly staked out the first serious battleground in jazz since the bebop-versus-swing debates fifteen years earlier. Litweiler, describing the reaction of bop progenitor Max Roach to a live performance of the group at the Five Spot, writes that the drummer ―punched Ornette in the mouth,‖ and later showed up in front of Coleman‘s apartment threatening further physical violence.54

Coleman‘s supporters however, were quite vocal in their praise of his vanguard work.

Russian critic, Valerie Mysovsky deemed that, ―Ornette Coleman…is surely the most prominent figure among the new jazz men.‖55 Other musicians, such as John Lewis, a former sideman of Charlie Parker, voiced his approval of Coleman and stated that his work

―was the only really new thing in jazz since the innovations in the mid forties.‖56

52 In 1961, music critic John Tynan amongst many others called the trend of free jazz a demonstration of ―anti-jazz.‖ 53 Leonard Feather, ―Blindfold Test,‖ Down Beat Magazine, April 9, 1964. 54 David Ake, ―Re-Masculating Jazz: Ornette Coleman, "Lonely Woman," and the New York Jazz Scene in the Late 1950s,‖ American Music, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring, 1998): 26 55 D. Morgenstern and M. Williams, ―The October Revolution; Two Views of the Avant Garde in Action,‖ Down Beat Magazine, November 19, 1964, 15. 56 Ake, ―Re-Masculating Jazz,‖ 26. 188 Coleman‘s musical language ushered a new standard of playing and improvisation for many musicians and his musical theories helped to restructure the more traditional forms of chord and scale progressions. Coleman‘s music was essentially a poly-hybrid, in that it was rooted in the concepts of rhythm and blues but was ultimately transformed by a personal eclecticism—which instituted a multiphonic, polyrhythmic, and often atonal approach—replacing the typical 12 and 32 bar, AABA musical progressions of bop with a

―free‖ method to improvisation and composition.57 Coleman‘s theory of ―harmelodics‖ helped to create this new found musical language, and saw this complex style as the apparent solution to the ―problems‖ of music.58 Radano states:

Coleman rejected tonality, creating an order based on line and rhythm, an order that seemed curiously consistent with the dominant musical elements of the African- American heritage, elements free jazz musicians would fully exploit.59

This ―exploitation‖ led to the immediate racialization of his artistry. McMichael states that, ―jazz audiences couldn‘t hear…Coleman…without thinking about racial subjectivity.‖60 Dean Robinson extends this notion by stating that ―black artists of the period,‖ such as Coleman, ―attempted to capture a very elusive entity: black culture.‖61

Coleman‘s response to these associations is varied. Valerie Wilmer offers that ―when he first came to New York, Ornette Coleman was adopted by some of the leading artistic

57 An interesting footnote is that Jackson Pollack‘s abstract painting, ―White Light,‖ graces the cover of Coleman‘s ―Free Jazz‖ album. 58 To further clarify, harmelodic theory was the musical writing of unison passages that do not transpose with different instruments. Basically, it is a musical occurrence where various instruments play in the same pitch but in different keys and each instrument in an ensemble plays both the rhythm and melody, thus blurring the traditional lines and opening up the space for personal improvisation. 59 Radano, New Musical Figurations, 74. 60 McMichael, ―We Insist—Freedom Now!‖ 403. 61 Dean Robinson, Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 86. 189 figures as one of their own, a situation he neither invited nor encouraged, yet one which he did not reject.‖62 Coleman himself viewed his artistic identity as a perception and one which was not fully determined by his own devices.

I really haven‘t had the facilities and opportunities to do what I do as good as I can do it…I still have that ―black jazz‖ image, I‘m an entertainer who‘s supposed to exist on a certain level, and that‘s it.63

The artistry of John Coltrane during the early era of free jazz was also associated with the aesthetics of the militant protest tradition by musicians and critics alike.64

Coltrane‘s racialization notably took shape with pieces such as ―Alabama‖ which instantly gained notoriety due to the politicized implications linked to the composition.

Horrifying televised scenes of white racist violence against black demonstrators resonated with jazz performances like…John Coltrane‘s November 1963 live recording of ―Alabama.‖ LeRoi Jones‘s (now Amiri Baraka) liner notes associated ―Alabama‖ with the bombings two months earlier of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four young girls, and Bill Cole‘s study of Coltrane claims that the melody of ―Alabama‖ echoes the ―rhythmic inflections of a speech given by Dr. Martin Luther King.‖65

A particularly telling account of Coltrane‘s racialization came in the form of a 1964 review of Coltrane‘s Live at Birdland album from Bill Mathieu.

If white critics can stand in any relation at all to Negro jazz of this caliber (it is not obvious that we can) then that relation must be humble, but it also may be malcontent. The dignity that propels Coltrane‘s music is dignity beyond the

62 Valerie Wilmer, As Serious As Your Life: The Story of the New Jazz (New York: Allison & Busby, 1977), 73. 63 Wilmer, As Serious As Your Life, 71. 64 Frank Kofsky was instrumental in applying the politics of militancy to Coltrane and free jazz in general. In an interview with Coltrane, he asked, ―Some musicians have said that there‘s a relationship between some of Malcolm‘s ideas and the music, especially the new music. Do you think there‘s anything in that?‖ Frank Kofsky, ―John Coltrane: An Interview (1970),‖ in The John Coltrane Companion edited by Carl Woideck (New York: Schirmer Books, 1998), 132 65 McMichael, ―We Insist—Freedom Now!‖ 403. 190 immediate grasp of the average man, especially the average white man, whose idea of dignity is born in relative peace.66

With Mathieu channeling Carl Van Vechten‘s language of racial ideology, Mathieu inadvertently positions Coltrane in a minstrelized setting, racially defining the scope and relevancy of his music. Valerie Wilmer also frames this perspective within the context of

Coleman and his inadvertent associations with minstrelsy.

This kind of situation is all too familiar to an artist of Coleman‘s stature. No longer forced to serve white society directly, he must nonetheless continue in the role of minstrel, making himself available to all kinds of humiliation in the process, in order to be allowed to work. In Coleman‘s case, his gentle manner and humble nature endear him to the entrepreneurs, who see the mantle of militancy hanging uneasily on his shoulders.67

As the musicians of the 1960‘s gave a revolutionary sonic voice to militant and radical forms of African-American popular consciousness the applications of minstrelsy remained difficult to shake. Sonny Rollins commented that, ―later on, John Coltrane and I were called the angry tenors. We were not angry, but we had strong views about American society.‖68 Although Davis routinely placed the notion of race into his discussions, his unflinchingly objective musical perspective allowed him to become a relevant tool in the struggles against the lasting concepts of minstrelsy. In many ways, Miles Davis was the toughest critic of the free jazz genre. Harmonically opposed to many of the styles, Davis routinely questioned not only the stylistic differences but further challenged the notion of the free jazz ―restructuralist.‖

I liked Ornette and Don (Cherry) as people, and I thought Ornette was playing more than Don was. But I didn‘t see or hear anything in their playing that was all that

66 Bill Mathieu, ―Coltrane Live at Birdland,‖ Down Beat Magazine, April 9, 1964. 67 Wilmer, As Serious As Your Life, 73. 68 Nisenson, Open Sky, 28. 191 revolutionary, and I said so. Trane was there…watching and listening, but he didn‘t say nothing like I did. A whole lot of the younger players and critics jumped down my throat after I put down Ornette, called me ―old fashioned‖ and shit. But I didn‘t like what they were playing.69

Davis extended his criticisms to other members of the free jazz movement notably in a

Down Beat Magazine ―Blindfold Test,‖ conducted by Leonard Feather. Upon hearing pianist Cecil Taylor, Davis states verbatim, ―Take it off!..In the first place, I hear some

Charlie Parker clichés…(that) don‘t even fit. Is this what the critics are digging? Them critics better stop having coffee. If there ain‘t nothing to listen to, they might as well admit it.‖70 Davis also criticized the works of Eric Dolphy, who was considered by many to be one of the premier saxophonists of his generation. Davis states, ―that‘s got to be Eric

Dolphy—nobody else sounds that bad!… I think he‘s ridiculous.‖71

Davis was also quick to mention the minstrelized subjugation of the new art form and pointed out how the integrationist subculture played an equal part in the propaganda and racialization of the ―new music.‖

It just looked to me like he (Cherry) was playing a lot of notes and looking real serious, and people went for that because people will go for anything they don‘t understand if it‘s got enough hype. They want to be hip, want always to be in on the new thing so they don‘t look unhip. White people are especially like that, particularly when a black person is doing something they don‘t understand. They don‘t want to have to admit that a black person they don‘t understand. They don‘t want to have to admit that a black person could be doing something that they don‘t know about. Or that he could be maybe a little more—or a whole lot more—intelligent than them. They can‘t stand to admit that kind of shit to themselves, so they run around talking about how great it is until the next ―new thing‖ comes along…That‘s what I thought was happening when Ornette hit town.72

69 Davis, Miles, 250-251. 70 Down Beat Magazine, June 1964, 31. 71 Down Beat Magazine, June 1964, 31. 72 Davis, Miles, 251. This particular sentiment of Davis‘ is expressed by Baldwin in a 1962 Esquire article, also found in McMichael: ―Well, the Negro is not happy in his place, and white people are not happy in their place, either—two very intimately related 192

Davis extends this concept even further with his assessment of white critics and their role of popularizing free jazz during the early to mid sixties.

I think some of the pushing of the free thing among a lot of the white music critics was intentional, because a lot of them thought that people like me were just getting too popular and too powerful in the music industry. They had to find a way to clip my wings. They loved the melodic, lyrical thing we were doing in Kind of Blue (1959), but the popularity of it and the influence we got from doing it scared them.73

The views of Davis were partially centered on his refusal to cater to mainstream codes. In a variety of ways, Davis symbolized the essence of the black militant in the early to mid sixties and communicated their doctrine through his scorn for racist police action, his public exclamations concerning racism, and his own temperament which fell upon any victim, black or white. Davis‘s stance however, was focused was on his personal refusal to avoid ―(uncle) tomming‖ and importantly, too avoid the cliché and fraudulence of being

―hip‖ for the sake of the audience.

White people have certain things they expect from Negro musicians—just like they‘ve got labels for the whole Negro race. It goes clear back to the slavery days. That was when Uncle Tomming got started because white people demanded it. Every little black child grew up seeing that getting along with white people meant grinning and acting like clowns. It helped white people to feel easy about what they had done and were doing, to Negroes, and that‘s carried right on over to now. You bring it down to musicians, they want you to not only play your instrument, but to entertain them, too, with grinning and dancing…I ain‘t saying I think all Negroes are the salt of the earth. It‘s plenty of Negroes I can‘t stand too.

facts—but the unhappiness of white people seems never to rattle and resound more fiercely than in their pleasure mills. The world that mainly frequents white nightclubs seems afflicted with a strange uncertainty as to whether or nor they are really having fun—they keep peeking at each other in order to find out. One‘s aware, in an eerie way, that there are barriers which must not be crossed, and that by these invisible barriers everyone is mesmerized.‖ McMichael, ―We Insist—Freedom Now!‖ 376. 73 Davis, Miles, 271-272 193 Especially those that act like they think white people want them to. They bug me worse than Uncle Toms.74

The Post-Minstrel Identity and Miles Davis

As the dominant model of American expressive art, minstrelsy has provided the conceptual materials for the continual social construction of race, and an actualized method for measuring and determining cultural identity.75 This assertion is based upon the historical draw of cultural fascination that has cyclically created and maintained the subjugated categories of ―blackness,‖ and indeed, ―whiteness‖ for generations to follow.

Minstrelsy therefore gains its power as an historical arbiter of cultural and racial identity—thus broadly evidencing this dissertation‘s claims of the perpetual minstrelized environment that black public intellectuals continually confronted in their cultural works and endeavors.

However, the lasting effects of minstrelsy and its ―racist logic‖ form an oppositional hybridity that on one hand maintains these relegated categories of race and

74 Alex Haley, ―Miles Davis: a Candid Conversation with the Jazz World's Premier Iconoclast,‖ Playboy, September 1962, 3. 75 This statement is potentially problematic, however it is supported by scholars such as Lott who testifies that ―blackface was the most visible part of a process by which black practices were appropriated and regulated.‖ Lott also offers a number of examples of how the minstrel show circulated throughout American culture but more importantly states how both blacks and whites became forever linked to the pervasive system of minstrelsy. ―Black performance itself, first of all, was precisely ‗performative,‘ a cultural invention, not some precious essence installed in black bodies; and for better or worse it was often a product of self-commodification, a way of getting along in a constricted world. Black people, that is to say, not only exercised a certain amount of control over such practices but perforce sometimes developed them in tandem with white spectators. Moreover, practices taken as black were occasionally interracial creations whose commodification on white stages attested only to whites‘ greater access to public distribution (and profit). At the same time, of course, there is no question that the white commodification of black bodies structured all of this activity, or that cultural forms of the black dispossessed in the United 194 culture while conversely structuring the basis for the counter-minstrel narratives and racially progressive politics expressed in the works and endeavors of black public intellectuals.76 In correspondence with the DuBoisian method of ―double- consciousness,‖ this duality of African-American identity is composed of both the

―unreconciled strivings‖ presented through American racism and the efforts to confront racism through cultural work.77 Existing as the determining factor of the African-

American public identity, minstrelsy‘s dual, converse ―logic‖ functions oppositionally, and by the 1960s as the struggle for black civil rights increased, so did the advent of a more militant, anti-minstrel black public identity.

By the early to mid 1960‘s, the musical art of African-Americans was broadly cited as the ―art of confrontation‖ by William Scott and Peter Rutkoff, reflecting the lingering presence of minstrelsy‘s oppositional hybridity and the racially progressive yet tumultuous times. Scott and Rutkoff suggest that the radical artistry found in New York

―thrived on New York‘s disorder and confusion,‖ further claiming that, ―in the 1960‘s,

New York‘s artists reclaimed the radicalism of modern art and rekindled the flame of

New York Modern.78 Cultural historian Robert McMichael furthers this notion by associating the new artistry presented in free jazz with the ―changes in the country‘s moral balance,‖ and signifies that the modern (contemporary) innovations of jazz directly

States have been appropriated and circulated as stand-ins for a supposedly national folk tradition.‖ Lott, Love and Theft, 39-40. 76 Lott, Love and Theft, 36. 77 The DuBois theory of ―double-consciousness‖—―It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one‘s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one‘ soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.‖ W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bantam Books, 1989), 3-4. 195 accorded with the various events of the Civil Rights Movement. McMichael strongly suggests the inevitability of the rising avant-garde, radical, and nationalist jazz artist— due in part to the rising ―integrationist subcultures‖ which would allow for black creativity to grow. McMichael, however, also hints that amidst this socially progressive subculture, black art and jazz specifically, was still primarily funded, critiqued and dictated through white patronage and thus subject to the parameters of minstrelsy.79

The integrationist subcultures of jazz clubs and other social spaces housed various kinds of cross-racial interaction between audience members and musicians, creating potentially important sites of resistance to racism. But because race relations in mainstream society had remained relatively unchanged since Reconstruction, and because these jazz subcultures of integration did not exist as a vacuum, sealed off from any influence by larger social forces, much of the cross-racial interaction in the jazz scenes still reverberated with long-standing elements of racism, especially primitivism.80

As McMichael states, the tenets of minstrelsy created a need, yet ironically fostered the

―progressive‖ scene and remained a relevant factor for black artists to contend against (or concede to) in order to maintain their artistry.81 Issuing jazz in these radical terms,

McMichael‘s analysis, as well as Scott and Rutkoff‘s present black artistry as the product

78 Scott and Rutkoff, New York Modern, 366-367. 79 The key word in this statement is of course, ―primarily,‖ as black musicians such as Bill Dixon formed groups such as the United Nations Jazz Society in order to incorporate a black voice in the education, organization, and marketing of jazz music. Dixon also helped to create the Jazz Composers Guild in 1964, and various groups such as the Black Artists Group the Detroit Creative Musicians Association and the Chicago based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians came about throughout the latter half of the 1960‘s. Jazz music, however, was still primarily funded and therefore controlled by whites as record companies, producers, and club owners were predominately Caucasian. Gioia, The History of Jazz, 354. 80McMichael, ―We Insist—Freedom Now!‖ 378. 81 Although it is implied that minstrelsy remained problematic for the jazz artist in the early to mid 1960‘s, it should be taken into consideration the ―conflicted intimacy‖ (Lott) that many black artists and political figures experienced while dealing with racially patronizing white audiences. This assumption gives a new prospective into the 196 of minstrelsy, yet ultimately as a progressive component for the continuous struggle for black freedom.

This progressive component was a direct opponent of the minstrelized environment and is symbolized through the jazz aesthetic, as dictated by William J.

Harris. Harris illustrates the jazz aesthetic through his interpretation of the poetics of

Amiri Baraka and compares Baraka‘s poetic artistry to the music of John Coltrane, casting the two artists as part of the same Black Nationalist and artistic ideal. Harris states that, ―Baraka‘s art and aesthetic grow out of one, the one that is intensely ethnic and hostile to the white world.‖82 The liberating sonic lexis exalted in jazz from the

1930s to the 1950s possessed a broad political resonance as its musicians produced art in collective response to the cultural, social, expressionist oppression routinely presented by the dominant conformist, racially segregated ideologies of mainstream American society.

During this period, this jazz identity functioned as a responsive challenge yet remained enclosed within the encompassing realm of minstrelsy, consisting of an array of artists following Ellington‘s creative influence who offered libratory artistic innovations to

encompassing power of minstrelsy and its direct effect on the African-American artistic and political community. 82 Harris continues with an assertion that, ―for Baraka, Coltrane epitomizes the jazz aesthetic process: he is the destroyer of Western forms.‖ Harris further states: ―From jazz (Baraka) learned how to reject, invert, and transform what the white avant-garde had taught him…He is consciously transforming white forms into black ones, consciously choosing a method that grows out of a black tradition, because for him, finally, avant-garde forms were not enough. Despite a strong identification with the bohemian poets, he had to face the realities of being black in America, and in America simply adding the adjective black transforms a concept…Consequently, Baraka felt obliged to turn the ideas and the forms of avant-garde art into black art.‖ The jazz aesthetic of Baraka and Coltrane as expressed by William Harris is therefore an aggressive response to minstrelsy and serves as a rejection as well as a ―mutilation,‖ ―destruction,‖ and ―invasion,‖ of dominant white mainstream culture. William J. Harris, The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986), 14. 197 effectively challenge the minstrelized surroundings of the prevailing scene. This scene is defined broadly as the whole of white, segregated American music industry and mainstream culture—principled by a democratic and capitalist ideology that enforced racialized social controls through the oppressive tactics and expressive means of minstrelsy. And in response to the minstrelized climate of this scene, the displays of expressionism supplied through jazz provided an alternative functional discourse for the social, cultural, and ultimately political leanings of African-American creative intellectuals.

Entering the 1960s, the identity of jazz also corresponded effectively with the tactics of liberation expressed by revolutionaries of the era. However, this identity made its distinction by eventually piercing and functioning outside the structural domain and systematic efforts of minstrelsy. As Ellington‘s 1935 piece emerged as a point of definition in response to his minstrelized surroundings, the jazz identity by the 1960s served as an expansion of this defining marker, gradually emerging outside of the oppressive qualities of this encompassing realm, in large part due to the diligent sonic, social, and ultimately political endeavors and standards established by creative intellectuals from its prior periods. From hard-bop to free jazz, the music of this period materialized from the minstrel show‘s disseminated sphere and became supported structurally by the vibrant, revolutionary coterminous efforts of black public intellectuals active in the fields of literature and the Civil Rights Movement.

In its original state the jazz identity was defined by its reactionary, responsive measures signifying a counter-minstrel sensibility in its production of culture. By the

1960s and due to the efforts and innovations of the past decades, the jazz identity

198 gradually shifted towards a post-minstrel sensibility—an identity that represented an individual emergence from minstrelsy‘s shadow, recognizing its hegemonic legacy, but ultimately representing a self-defined ideology, post-modern in its scope and categorically removed from the determining functions of minstrelsy. In recent scholarship, this terminology is most often categorized from a chronological perspective, describing the descendant subjects still engaged within the racialized boundaries and stereotyped identities of the minstrel show.83 Additionally, the post-minstrel identity is also depicted to categorize modern racialized strategies of white agency, and how that power is reflected, coded, and enacted after the overt racist displays of the minstrel show have disintegrated from the public eye.84 For the purpose of this study, the post-minstrel sensibility enacted in black creative public intellectuals by the 1960s existed as a realized ideal of Black Power ideology, reversing dominant cultural constructions of a minstrelized culture through a specific articulation racial politics unconcerned with the protocols, restraints, and boundaries of minstrelsy.

By 1962 in an article entitled the, ―Jazz World Figures Split over Jim Crow,‖ the

Chicago Defender evidenced a discourse that engaged in the terms of this post-minstrel identity, declaring its existence by locating separate factions within the jazz scene in a

83 Thomas Riis‘ work historicizes minstrelsy, referring to ―post-minstrel figures like Aunt Jemima.‖ See Thomas L. Riis, ―Concert Singers, Prima Donnas, and Entertainers: The Changing Status of Black Women Vocalists in Nineteenth-Century America,‖ edited by Michael Saffle, James R Heintze, Music And Culture In America, 1861-1918 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), 73. 84 David Roediger‘s examination of the ―imperialist gaze,‖ correlates with this post- minstrel perspective, as the gaze expresses both ―racism and privilege, reflecting and reinforcing how classes within the imperialist powers see both the colonized and each other.‖ See, David Roedigger, Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 48. 199 manner that echoed the context of the Feather and Heckman pieces. Pointing directly to the legacy of the minstrel show with its defining terminology, the article states:

Crow Jim—Crow Crow—Jim Jim. And like what‘s happening? If all this sounds confusing, it is. Jazz itself is confusing, and the current state of affairs isn‘t helping one bit. The first two words in the first sentence is the ‗name‘ used to describe a form of reverse segregation. Many prominent Negro jazz musicians feel that racial prejudice exists in a field that belongs to the Negro. Therefore, whites are intruders. Crow Crow was created to identify Negro musicians who refuse to subscribe to Crow Jim, and its opposite is Jim Jim.85

With the article specifying ―such out-standing artists as Charlie Mingus, Max Roach, Mary

Lou Williams, Art Blakey, and Horace Silver‖ as symbols of a new breed of ―angry‖ musicians, the article points to ―the sound of nationalism‖ in their works as sonic and aesthetic repudiations of the outlining ―racial prejudices‖ that permeated the jazz field. The agency of these select musicians also cited in the article also outlines how black jazz artists began to invert the standard minstrelized hierarchy in their refusal to hire white musicians.

The article cites powerful impresario George Wein, who ceded, ―it‘s murder today for white players,‖ concluding that, ―Negro clubs just won‘t play them.‖86 The article also locates Louis Armstrong outside of this paradigm in order to clarify the identity of the post- minstrel faction, explaining that, ―to most of the cats, a great star such as Louis Armstrong is considered an Uncle Tom,‖ citing his refusal ―to hop on the freedom train,‖ as laid out by these select musicians.87

Dissenting from this faction, Miles Davis vowed to hire his ―players on talent only,‖ situating himself in a political middle ground according to the terms laid out in the

85 ―Jazz World Figures Split over Jim Crow,‖ Chicago Defender, October 20, 1962, 10. 86 ―Jazz World Figures Split over Jim Crow,‖ Chicago Defender, October 20, 1962, 10. 200 piece.88 The neutrality attributed to Davis‘s perspective mirrors the context of the original

Feather piece that omits the record of his publically discordant relationship with his white audience in order to emphasize the innovative quality of his music. Davis, however, was cited numerous times in various media outlets giving voice to the ―angry,‖ post-minstrel sensibility that further clarified the terms of this discursive identity. Commenting on this label, Davis presented his thoughts by the late 1950s:

Around this time, people—white people—started saying that I was always ―angry,‖ that I was ―racist,‖ or some silly shit like that. Now, I‘ve been racist toward nobody, but that don‘t mean I‘m going to take shit from a person just because he‘s white. I didn‘t grin or shuffle and didn‘t walk around with my finger up my ass begging for no handout thinking I was inferior to whites. I was living in America, too, and I was going to try and get everything that was coming to me.89

Aggressively condemning both the popular theatrics that relegated black performers to stereotypical representations and the submissive nature of African-American artists who acquiesced to these designs, Davis‘s early-developed, post-minstrel sensibility sets the true terms of this identity and publically foreshadows the identity politics espoused by black creative intellectuals in the era of Black Power.90

Refusing to be marginalized on the basis of race, Davis‘s post-minstrel identity draws from his pursuit of musical innovation but is clarified through his ability to reverse hegemonic categories of race traditionally rooted within the jazz scene. In a 1959 Chicago

87 ―Jazz World Figures Split over Jim Crow,‖ Chicago Defender, October 20, 1962, 10. 88 ―Jazz World Figures Split over Jim Crow,‖ Chicago Defender, October 20, 1962, 10. 89 Davis, Miles, 240. 90 Picking up on the political atmosphere of jazz in the early 1960s the Chicago Daily Defender wrote, ―jazz was spiked with politics at Carnegie Hall, N.Y., last Friday night‖ spotlighting a Davis Concert that was ―a fund-raising affair for the African Research Foundation and the dissidents included a number of extreme Negro nationalists 201 Defender article, Davis made ―international news,‖ by creating, ―quite a stir in London when the critics and the British public expressed a coolness to his coolness to them.‖91

Commenting on his post-minstrel identity, Davis attributes his behavior to the lessons learned from his past experiences:

I felt that I didn‘t have to take their stupid bullshit any longer. This feeling was deep down in my mind and wasn‘t something that I knew I was feeling or thinking about. I had a lot of anger in me about things that had happened to me in the last four years; I didn‘t trust hardly anyone, so I think that had something to do with my attitude. When we would go places to play, I was just cold to the motherfuckers; pay me and I‘ll play. I wasn‘t about to kiss anybody‘s ass and do that grinning shit for nobody.92

Labeled as ―cold‖ and ―just plain rude,‖ by his refusal to acknowledge the audience, Davis reverses the traditional visualizations of black artists and artistry customary of a minstrelized setting in an effort to repel and dismantle it as a standard of entertainment protocols for black artists.93 With Davis ―quite often referred to as a villain,‖ Davis‘s public demeanor was a visible solution to minstrelsy‘s grip on black culture and black cultural practices, issuing a public visage that rejected the assumptions of racialized deference on the part of the black artist.94

who paraded outside the hall.‖ ―Max Roach, Miles Davis ‗Bias‘ Feud,‖ Chicago Daily Defender (Daily Edition), May 29, 1961, 17. 91 Dolores Calvin, ―Miles Davis ‗Makes‘ International News,‖ Chicago Daily Defender, November 30, 1960, 22. 92 Davis, Miles, 180. 93 Dolores Calvin, ―Miles Davis ‗Makes‘ International News,‖ Chicago Daily Defender, November 30, 1960, 22. Additional sources: ―What‘s with Moody Miles Davis,‖ Chicago Daily Defender (Daily Edition), August 16, 1962, 17. 94 Bob Hunter, ―Trumpeter Miles, Man of Many Moods,‖ Chicago Daily Defender (Daily Edition), January 28, 1963, 16. In 1959, Davis gained a ―villainous‖ reputation and public notoriety due to his arrest ―for felonious assault and disorderly conduct‖ after allegedly ―grappling with a policeman outside the Birdland Jazz Emporium on Broadway.‖ ―Miles Jailed for Disturbance,‖ Chicago Daily Defender (Daily Edition), August 27, 1959, 3. Further coverage found in ―Miles Davis Labors to Regain ‗Right to Work‘ Credits in New York,‖ Chicago Daily Defender, September 2, 1959, 18. Davis reflected on the arrest 202 Importantly, Davis‘s post-minstrel identity is still deeply concerned with matters of race. His identity stems from his racialized classification in a segregated society, however, his post-minstrel sensibilities materialize in his successful attempts to redefine the margins of black artistry, theatricality, and behavior within a realm that absolutely negates the defining posers of minstrelsy. Additionally, these sensibilities are constructed as part of the discursive practice of Black Power. While publically critical of white racism, Davis‘s post- minstrel, Black Power infused identity emerges in his inversion of the white authoritative power designed to marginalize his artistry.

Presenting his own ‗self-portrait‘ in the current issue of Esquire magazine, Mr. Davis describes his mainspring as, ‗White folks. White people are responsible for my success. They make it so hard for you that a long time ago I got mad and made up my mind to be two, three times as good at whatever I decided to do. If I was white, I probably wouldn‘t have had the drive.95

Recalling his powerful influence, Davis‘s drummer Tony Williams evidences the political components central to public character of Davis. Associating Davis with the most notable black leaders of the Post WW2 era, Williams‘ reflections give insight on the role black creative public intellectuals played in the public discernment of Black Power and the origins of the post-minstrel identity in artists such as Miles Davis:

In the fifties, Miles and Max Roach were speaking like men, acting like men. I saw them and said, ―that‘s the life I want to live.‖ Miles showed you how to carry yourself. He inspired people to think beyond what they thought they were capable as an opportunity to speak out against white racism. Davis states, ―I look up on the wall and see they were advertising voyages for officers to take to Germany, like a tour. And this is about fourteen years after the war. And they‘re going there to learn police shit…they‘ll probably teach them how to be meaner and shit, do to niggers over here what the Nazis did to the Jews over there. I couldn‘t believe that shit in there and they‘re supposed to be protecting us. I ain‘t done nothing but help a woman friend of mine get a cab and she happened to be white and the white boy who was the policeman didn‘t like seeing a nigger doing that.‖ Davis, Miles, 239. 95 ―Miles Davis Thanks Whites for Success,‖ Chicago Defender, February 17, 1962, 1. 203 of. The time I‘m talking about, from 1957 on, this is before the Civil Rights Movement of the sixties, before anyone knew about King or Muhammad Ali or Malcolm X. Miles was the person people of my generation looked to for those things. So when the sixties came, I didn‘t need anybody to tell me, ―we shall overcome.‖ I was already living it.96

Conclusion: The Post-Minstrel Identity in the Post-Modern Scene

By 1970, Miles Davis had finally released the album Jack Johnson, a work of modal based, free-form compositions and melodic riffs previously charted in his live work from the mid to late 1960s. The album was a soundtrack to the documentary film about the late boxer‘s life. In the liner notes, Davis, an amateur boxer who idolized fighters such as Johnson and middleweight legend Sugar Ray Robinson stated simply that

―Johnson portrayed freedom,‖ continuing that ―he was a fast living man, he liked women—lots of them and most of them white…His flamboyance was more than obvious.

And no doubt Mighty Whitey felt no black man should have all this.‖97 The admiration that Davis had for Johnson‘s grandiosity was not based solely on his considerable boxing prowess. Jack Johnson was a symbol of not only excellence in his craft, but of an essential, unrestricted manhood and masculine agency that challenged dominant culture by explicitly refuting racist social, professional, and indeed, legal controls. Most importantly, Johnson was a pragmatic rejection of a previously unquestionable African-

American cultural reality—a seemingly unlynchable African-American, or as perceived,

96 See Greg Tate, ―Preface to a One-Hundred-and-Eighty Volume Patricide Note: Yet Another Few Thousand Words on the Death of Miles Davis and the Problem of the Black Male Genius,‖ in Black Popular Culture, a project by Michele Wallace and edited by Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992).

97 Miles Davis, A Tribute to Jack Johnson, CD, Columbia, 1970. 204 an unlynchable nigger—and a man who on the public surface, controlled his often dangerous, uncertain, and indeed, minstrelized environment.

This representative ideological template of self-defined, counter-hegemonic, masculine empowerment was crucial to the public identity of Davis. Appropriating this image, Davis‘s post-minstrel identity was a gendered identity that physically enabled Davis to challenge the dominant racist cultural assumptions defined within the order of minstrelsy.98 The ―temperament‖ that Leonard Feather casually avoided consisted of

Davis‘s public displays of pugilistic and uncompromising discourse, portrayed on stage, through the media, and in his documented personal life. Davis‘s unlynchable identity was drawn from the affluence of his upper-middle class roots, his refusal to cater to minstrel stereotypes and his disdain for African-American performance identities mired with minstrelized characterizations. Davis explains:

As much as I love Dizzy and loved Louis ―Satchmo‖ Armstrong, I always hated the way they used to laugh and grin for the audiences. I know why they did it—to make money and because they were entertainers as well as trumpet players. They had families to feed. Plus they both liked acting the clown; it‘s just the way Dizzy and Satch were. I don‘t have nothing against them doing it if they want to. But I didn‘t like it and didn‘t have to like it. I come from a different social and class background than both of them, and I‘m from the Midwest, while both of them are from the South. So we look at white people a little differently.99

Drawing a clear line of demarcation, Davis establishes his post-minstrel sensibilities based upon segregated and non-segregated geographical roots, and acknowledges the differences presented in his minstrel milieu and those faced by Armstrong and Gillespie.

Davis‘s milieu of minstrelsy, structured by the rhetoric and emerging influence of Black

98 Herman Gray‘s analysis cites ―black jazz men‖ such as Davis who ―not only challenged whiteness but exiled it to the (cultural) margins of blackness—i.e., in their hands blackness was a powerful symbol of the masculine.‖ Herman Gray, ―Black Masculinity and Visual Culture,‖ Callaloo 19, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 401. 205 Power allows for this concession, granting Davis unlynchable agency, as opposed to the oppressive, Jim Crow sanctioned realities experienced by Armstrong and Gillespie, and in spite of the potential of critics and audiences observing him, ―as an arrogant little nigger.‖100

Davis‘s conception of freedom is based on his self-defined alternative to observe, critique, and interact with whites ―a little differently,‖ reaping the benefits of class perceptions and status to de-marginalize minstrelsy‘s attempt to define his identity.

Davis proclaims his post-minstrel identity through his admission of the pervasive qualities of minstrelized tropes in the formation of black performance characterization.

Yet the agency displayed through Davis‘s decision to actively dismiss minstrelsy‘s hold on his identity situates the artist as an early, qualified example of this perspective. Davis continues:

Also I was younger than them and didn‘t have to go through the shit they had to go through to get accepted in the music industry. They had already opened up a whole lot of doors for people like me to go through, and I felt that I could be about just playing my horn—the only thing I wanted to do. I didn‘t look at myself as an entertainer like they both did. I wasn‘t going to do it just so that some non-playing, racist, white motherfucker could write some nice things about me. Naw, I wasn‘t going to sell out my principles for them. I wanted to be accepted as a good musician and that didn‘t call for no grinning, but just being able to play the horn good. And that‘s what I did then and now. Critics can take that or leave it.101

Locating his identity as a display against racism and artistic marginalization Davis effectively asserted his post-minstrel identity through the dichotomy of his public

99 Davis, Miles, 83. 100 Davis, Miles, 83. This milieu and identity is shared by other members of his bop generation. Davis states, ―Max (Roach) and (Thelonious) Monk felt like that, and J. J. and Bud Powell too. So that‘s what brought us close together, this attitude about ourselves and our music. We were getting reputations at this time.‖ Davis, Miles, 83. 101 Davis, Miles, 83. 206 character. Defiantly self-defined, Davis‘s unlynchable character is a physical as well as a rhetorical presence. On one hand, embracing the taboos of black masculinity as central constructions of his character and articulating a cool masculinity, based upon misogyny, drug use, the threat of violence, and nihilism and priding his own public construction as both a criminal hustler and potentially menacing physical threat.102 On the other hand,

Davis‘s defiantly self-defined unlynchable character also embraced beauty and sonic tranquility, artistically displaying aesthetic merit through his cultural works and in effect, his public persona. This dichotomy, in association with his uncompromised commitment towards destroying minstrelized tropes envisions Davis within the ―new space‖ afforded by Black Power ideology and fueled by a post-minstrel identity. Publically displaying a rejection of minstrelized tropes, Davis‘s overt, self-defined representation, like Ellington, recuperates and communicates politics in a regard that does not necessitate specific political involvement or direction. However, his vocalized hostility towards cultural, social, racial, and artistic marginalization documents the attempts to construct a post- minstrel identity in both the emergent field of free jazz and the surrounding spheres of black creative public intellectuals.

102 Davis described this identity as part of a performative act. Davis comments on his foray into acting as a ―pimp and a dope dealer,‖ stating, ―when I did that role, someone asked me how I felt acting and I told them, ‗you‘re acting all the time when you‘re black.‘ And it‘s true. Black people are acting out roles every day in this country just to keep getting by. If white people really knew what was on most black people‘s minds it would scare them to death. Blacks don‘t have the power to say these things, so they put on masks and do great acting jobs just to get through the fucking day.‖ Davis, Miles, 375. Coincidentally, Davis however, admitted to working as a pimp and a hustler many times in his real life throughout his autobiography. 207 Conclusion

This dissertation intervenes with jazz scholarship by designating advancements in musical composition as tangible indicators of black intellectual history, thus charting the progress of ideas in music alongside the developing currents of anti-racist activism to observe how jazz served as praxis for these larger ideas of racial freedom. By the 1930s, jazz became a practical application of anti-racist expression, and the complex process by which the innovations in the field stand as the material, tangible proof of the progressive efforts of black creative public intellectuals to deconstruct minstrelized confines convey the alternative, radical efforts of African-Americans to articulate progressive political narrative in art. Via jazz, African Americans produced a means to effectively navigate a minstrelized culture, although with jazz operating as a politicized tool of the Left, or the government, this dissertation has exposed the ways in which this politicization process has also serviced the racist parameters of minstrelsy. Unraveling these complex histories, this dissertation‘s ultimate goal has been to display how jazz produces an accessible musical language, and to illustrate the various ways in which this narrative has been decoded by the musicians and non-musical activists of black freedom.

This project has primarily been invested in understanding a broader reading of minstrelsy in the 20th century. The process in which this dissertation imagines and maps minstrelsy as a pervasive societal force is by no means the only available option for its discussion in jazz and African-American history. Strong examples certainly remain of traditional minstrel tropes in jazz, particularly in the history of facial makeup and the darkening or lightening of one‘s face to appease traditional minstrel stereotypes. Framing

208 minstrelsy outside of its purely historical rendering helps to uncover the vital importance of understanding black art as a political tool and ideological device. Thus, this project argues for the power of minstrelsy, framing it as the central discursive indicator of racial discernment in American popular and social culture,

Each chapter problematizes minstrelsy by the determining historical context of the differing decades—conceptualizing minstrelsy as an encompassing system of thought that addresses how cultural conceptions are drawn from the racial practices and racialized ideologies of a particular era. In more specific terms, minstrelsy exists in the historical scope of this project as an oppressive domain that shapes and permeates the dominant discourse of race. Hailing from its roots of blackface theater, this dissertation posits minstrelsy as a lasting consequence of the minstrel show; a 20th century permutation that defines how African-Americans are culturally interpreted in the public eye. This dissertation acknowledges the risk of capaciousness in this definition of minstrelsy.

However, this dissertation recognizes the voluminous nature of minstrelsy as its crucial condition and locates its shifting instability throughout the differing decades as the defining quality of minstrelsy‘s separate milieus. Therefore, this dissertation argues for an understanding of minstrelsy outside of its traditional conceptions that are funneled through the logic of blackface performance and buffoonish stereotype. Minstrelsy, in the historical scope of this dissertation is the oppressive effect of its blackface roots, circulating the

American racial discourse in the 20th century as a permanent racialized stamp affixed to not only the production of black art but the general public perception of the African-American populous. This dissertation‘s claims of a minstrelized culture are understood to incorporate

209 racial bias as a result of longstanding pejorative views initially created through blackface minstrel theater.

This comprehensive, ubiquitous definition draws from its blackface roots, but accounts for African-Americans experiencing minstrelsy‘s effect outside the visual history of 19th century minstrel theater. It also accounts for African-Americans experiencing minstrelsy‘s consequential affects outside of 20th century examples of black stereotype including Beulah, Buckwheat, Amos and Andy, among others. In essence, tracing all of the examples of jazz artists donning the minstrel mask throughout the years is not the crucial intervention of this dissertation. Rather, this dissertation‘s examples envision black musicians and creative intellectuals reacting to minstrelsy and living and producing within this oppressive domain. Minstrelsy remains a fixture of not only popular culture depictions of African-Americans, but a fixture of the American discourse in its discernment of race.

African-Americans feel, interpret, and experience minstrelsy‘s effects outside of a direct viewing of blackface as their art is immediately racialized as a result of America‘s permanent racialized discourse.

The counter-minstrel narrative and identity offered avenues of participation for creative and intellectual pursuits without the concession of minstrelized regulations. The counter-minstrel narrative emerged in the musical language, and specified the moments when compositional innovation reconfigured the parameters placed upon black creative art by the racialized confines of minstrelsy. The counter-minstrel identity emerged as a result of the narrative‘s influence, and engaged the possibility of imagining one‘s self as an

210 active, viable agent of the counter-minstrel narrative‘s progressive objectives.1 The post- minstrel identity is the sequential outcome of counter-minstrel activity and the politics of

Black Power, negating he grip of minstrelsy‘s pejorative classifications in counter- hegemonic display of intellectual, artistic, and personal agency.

The various chapters of this dissertation have attempted to uncover a deeper understanding of the artistic and political communities of black creative intellectuals and those concerned with the political, social, and artistic affairs of African-Americans. The goals of this project have been to illustrate, analyze, and clarify the musical language that provided an alternate voice for the anti-racist endeavors of the Left and examine the applications of political ideology to the compositional and ideological framework of jazz music. In a discussion of jazz, there remains an intrinsic political stamp to the sound as both racialized and radically intellectual, in the same spirit in which much of African-

American literature has been filtered and interpreted. This dissertation argues that jazz has fulfilled a similar role within black culture with music providing s a deeper avenue for analysis, allowing for an examination of the aesthetic and coded, yet ultimately tangible and accessible qualities of intellectual expression.

1 This identity works in partial theoretical correlation with the Cornel West quote from Race Matters that locates the black jazz artist as a literal embodiment of an idyllic, distinctly modern, and progressively social and ideological intellectual character. West states, ―I use the term ‗jazz‘ here not so much as a term for a musical art form, as a mode of being in the world, an improvisational mode of protean, fluid, and flexible dispositions toward reality suspicious of ‗either/or‘ viewpoints, dogmatic pronouncements, or supremacist ideologies. To be a jazz freedom fighter is to attempt to galvanize and energize world-weary people into forms of organization with accountable leadership that promote critical exchange and broad reflection. The interplay of individuality and unity is not one of uniformity and unanimity imposed from above but rather a conflict among diverse groupings that reach a dynamic consensus subject to questioning and criticism.‖ Cornel West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage, 1994), 150. 211 Understanding the ways in which music produces political resonance, how musical text provides a narrative for African-American identity and how the discourse of jazz performance coincides with the political history of African-Americans exposes the jazz artist as witnesses, historians, and interpreters of American culture. Furthermore, this project‘s goal has been to gain a thorough understanding of the surrounding intellectual climate that supplied, fostered, and challenged the art, innovation, and radicalism of the music and its musicians. It is my interest in this ―intellectual climate‖ that fuels the very basic hypothesis behind this dissertation. A hypothesis which states that jazz has been created in large part by the leftist radicalism of black public intellectuals and that this leftist radicalism could only survive and progress through the specific artistry of jazz music.

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